Virtually Impossible

Explore the 'Virtually Impossible' with Sprung!! Integrated Dance Theatre at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery, Ballina.

During September and October visitors to the Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG) are being invited to explore the virtual worlds of dancers from Sprung!! Integrated Dance Theatre in a specially commissioned exhibition, Virtually Impossible.

Virtually Impossible is a collaborative project between Sydney based multidisciplinary artist Andrew Christie, and SPRUNG!! Integrated Dance Theatre, a not for profit community organisation providing dance and theatre training and workshops for people with a disability. During his time as a Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG).

Ignite Studio artist in-residence in 2018, Christie became acquainted with SPRUNG!! and participated in weekly rehearsals, even taking preliminary 3D infrared scans of the dancers’ bodies in anticipation of further collaboration. And though Christie’s time with SPRUNG!! was relatively brief, the impressions left on both parties proved to be too deep to ignore.

Over the past nine months they kept in contact in any way possible, discussing via email and Skype what a SPRUNG!! – inspired artwork might look like alongside the organisations current work-in-progress, Things Impossible – from which this exhibition derived its adapted title. What resulted from these early discussions was the conclusion that Christie would apply his experience with 3D technologies to develop sculptural and digital works for NRCG inspired by SPRUNG dancers.

Coupled with Christie’s multidisciplinary practice involving performance, sculpture and digital media, the result is a series of virtual worlds where visitors to the Gallery can navigate using a Virtual Reality headset to translate real movements within the gallery in the dancers digitally constructed ones. The result of the combined works is a shared, ongoing and experimental interaction that does not divert attention away from critical issues but embraces them as surmountable challenges best addressed with optimism and even humour.

The increased participatory agency that virtual reality lends also emphasises the role of each viewer to help empower those who might be overlooked and underappreciated due to arbitrary and uncontrollable factors which have no effect on the capacity for change and compassion that is common regardless of our cultural or political classifications.

‘Virtually Impossible’ is showing at NRCG (44 Cherry Street, Ballina) until 20 October 2019 and is made possible from funding from the NSW Government through Create NSW.