Remnants

BODYART's "Remnants"

RETHINKING PERFORMANCE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

In the spring of 2019, BODYART Dance’s Artistic Director Leslie Scott and I shared a glass of wine hinside a home in New Orleans’ Fontainebleau neighborhood—the site of the company’s immersive performance Maison, which I had attended the night before. Describing her inspiration for setting the site-specific work inside a private home, she told me: “We all have different lives when we close the front door. So how do you share that—or not share that—or reveal, or conceal that? There’s just something really, really rich in the space of the home.”

Two years later, against the context of a global pandemic, Scott is still thinking about home. “Sometimes, I find myself just telling the same stories over and over again,” she laughed over a phone call in late July. But, of course, the concept of home—especially as a site for acting out our lives—has gained a new significance since she produced Maison.

Photo courtesy of BODYART

BODYART’s answer to the challenges of producing work during the pandemic was, like so many other performing arts organizations, to embrace the digital space. The result is Remnants—a digital storytelling experience that uses augmented reality technologies to explore, once again, the concept of home.

Inspired by video games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Mountain, Scott collaborated with Jesse Garrison from Night Light Labs and writer Ann Glaviano to figure out the story that she wanted to tell. “When it came down to it,” Scott said, “we were thinking of the components of home and components of time. We reflected on our own homes and the four walls and roofs over our head. During the pandemic, whatever homespace you had had to contain your whole life for several months. And we wondered, could that be the jumping off point for a story?”

Remnants’ journey, Scott explained, careful to avoid spoilers, takes place within the spaces of each viewer’s individual home. Using the app, “We’re asking you to move through your house in ways you perhaps haven’t before. You are asked to change your perspective—maybe lay on the ground and look at your ceiling.” The choreography is presented as a series of choices, Scott explained. The viewer has options for how they move through the space. “We tried to make it as universal as possible, using items or spaces in your home that many people will have. We’re not asking you to go to your third lanai. We guide you to your sink, your power outlet, cues that are accessible and can be part of a shared experience. It’s about, too, really appreciating those things that we’ve curated in our homes, that have kept us company during this pandemic.”

Reflecting a certain reality of the pandemic’s isolation, Remnants also uses the borders of our spaces to emphasize the ways we interact with time. “We’re playing with what happens when time goes haywire in your space,” said Scott in a recorded conversation on the project published on the bodyartdance.com website. “We are looking at things in our life that we use to stop time.” She cites refrigerators, eye cream, photographs, Tupperware containers—“all the ways in which we feel like somehow, we can win, or we can stop time from marching on.”

Such meditations on time resurface when Scott considers the future of performing arts. People often talk about going back to the way things were before, she explained. “But we’re embracing this idea that we aren’t going back. We are moving forward.” Experimental from the start, BODY- ART Dance is no stranger to integrating technology into traditional performance. Since its beginnings in 2006, the organization has created five dance films, including Legal Canvas, which melded the art of dance with that of graffiti art—highlighting each form’s ephemerality and public nature. Scott has collaborated with video artists Reid Farrington, Patrick Lovejoy, and Sofy Yuditskaya for various projects, and the company’s recent dance works hymn+them and Maison each incorporated features like projection, music, and light into live performances.

“We’ve always worked in the digital space,” said Scott. When the pandemic hit, “It felt like the right time to pivot. So many of our performances got cancelled, and rather than putting a bandaid on this and hoping to quote-unquote ‘go back to the way it was,’ we needed to keep moving forward. We needed to invest in the infrastructure in a meaningful way, instead of just making something work quickly and then shifting back to only in-person performances.”

As an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at Tulane University, Scott teaches the Tulane Interdisciplinary Experience Seminar (TIDES) for first year students. In it, she explained, she and her students discuss their relationships to the digital world: things like social media and its intersections with real life. “It’s freedom for a lot of people,” she said. “The digital realm is access for a lot of people. It gives you the ability to make believe or just be who you are for a little while.”

Photos courtesy of BODYART

While Scott emphasized that she still firmly believes in the art of bodies moving through space for a physically present audience, she also imagines different ways to get there. Managing Director Megan Lewicki predicts the ways the next generation will consume and produce art in her conversation with Scott published on the BODY- ART website: “They’re going to value different experiences. The experiences that we long for, and that we are nostalgic for (like live theater, or live spaces, or in-person experiences or whatever) are not going to be the same for the next generation. They are going to create new technologies, new digital spaces that cater to that kind of visceral exchange that we get from in-person performance. I think they’re going to be able to create that digitally in some kind of way with technology that doesn’t exist yet.”

Such a shift, Scott hopes, would be a way for performing arts experiences to become more accessible to a broader diversity of audiences. “This is a space where we can be making art and meeting people where they are,” she said, noting that access to the app would cost no more than a few dollars—making it available not only to people unable to physically go out to the theater because of health, time, or transportation concerns; but also to people who have never patronized live performance because of the cost. “We’re really doing the work when we say that everyone should have access to the arts, and we want to be sure that we are adding to that conversation.”

Bringing the technology to the forefront of the work, though, rather than using it as a supporting mechanism, is a journey that has certainly come with its challenges. “It’s a whole other level of planning,” said Scott. “Just so many different considerations, and it’s not second nature for me. There is a learning curve, but I’m learning so much about how to tell stories in this space. Learning the technology, the terms, the different things that are available.”

Scott intends for the beta version of Remnants to be released in early 2022— though she emphasized that they want to give it the time it needs to be the best possible experience for the largest number of viewers. “As audiences, we have such an extreme digital literacy that we haven’t had before. We’re used to beautiful images, phones being as clear as real life. We want to be in conversation with what people expect visually, but also be sure that there is real substance to the story itself.”

Once Remnants is ready, though, Scott predicts progress will ramp up exponentially. “The goal is to have chapters that are all part of a larger story,” she said. “It’ll be an episodic experience that is totally user driven.”

We’ve spent over a year now getting used to our smaller physical worlds, expanded with the help of technology. Art has always been a pathway to experimentation and expansion. Bringing it even more prominently into the digital space, who can predict where it will take us? “If you think about your phone—it opens up the entire world to you, but also sucks you through the rabbit hole, where you can fall into a totally different place,” said Scott. “My hope with Remnants is that people will give themselves permission to follow their curiosities, that your home might be transformed into a space that you see differently than you did before.”

bodyartdance.com