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Touring Prospectus and Press Kit | What People Are Saying | Complete Bibliography |
April 2007 In Dance Article | Reviews (selected full text)

Touring Prospecuts and Press Kits:

To view our complete prospectus detailing current touring repertory, lectures and workshops, as well as our complete press kit, please visit: www.double-vision.biz/press.html.



What people are saying about DOUBLE VISION:

 

"an enchanting evening of dance, video, and aural delight" 
San Francisco Bay Guardian

“As If By Falling was…finely constructed and sharply
performed…[Three Canons and Mise en Scénes] was both
beautiful and frightening….Video Action Painting, a technical
marvel by Clute…was amazing to watch.”

“Can technology wipe us all out? Wipe out art? It was worth
thinking about and amazing to watch.”
Albuquerque Journal

"...exhilarating, funny, challenging, complex, beautiful. Un-conventional and experimental, just the way modern dance should be."  
Yelp

"The most remarkable aspect of 13 Dreams of a Dying Clairvoyant, presented by the experimental multi-media performance group DOUBLE VISION…is the unity of vision among its teeming cast"

"...an exciting new addition to the Bay Area arts scene."
IN DANCE, Dancers Group Newsletter


"a pinnacle example of the crossover of modern dance with audio/visual components… DOUBLE VISION's innovative routine…allowed us to be a part of a new and evolving style of art."

 "It is my hope that more people who are artists as well as those who have no background in art or dance have the opportunity to view the work of DOUBLE VISION."  
Hilary Burke, Producer – Meaning in the 21st Century


"DOUBLE VISION Artistic Director Pauline Jennings...recently premiered a captivating piece, ...As if by Falling, at CounterPULSE in which the five dancers conveyed a startling connection without ever touching at all.  Unfettered from the sense that there was something "to get," the viewer's mind was free to drift among associations, the dancers evoking now a flock of birds, now an ocean current, now a windstorm gathering force."
IN DANCE, Dancers Group Newsletter


"Directed by Sean Clute and Pauline Jennings, DOUBLE VISION's artists forged a balance between unity, complexity and chaos as visitors roamed freely through an environment of performance, dance, music, video and technology."  
ArtsEXTRA

"I can't believe how lucky we are this group chose us as their Phoenix stop, especially when we saw some of the fantastic spaces they are playing. It's an honor to be working with talented artists like this." JRC, Trunk Space, Phoenix, AZ


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Complete Bibliograpy:

April 2007 In Dance Article:

DOUBLE VISION: To Futurism and Back Again

Sean Clute & Pauline Jennings
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If you dare visit our apartment in Oakland, CA you will undoubtedly have to watch your step.  Inside is a mess of cables, hard drives, computer parts, Pilates balls, yoga mats, and bowls of leftover oatmeal covering the floor.  Besides our hodgepodge of tools for creative use there is no furniture or decoration.  The one exception can be found on the kitchen wall where hangs an enigmatic black and white photograph of two men dancing in robot tin-can outfits.  Until a month ago, we knew very little of the image’s history, meaning, or impact the dancing robot people would have on our intermedia group DOUBLE VISION.  Now, the past and future seem to converge as we look for our missing VGA adaptor.  

After investigating the photograph, we discovered that it was from a 1924 Futurist dance by F.T. Marinetti entitled Macchina del 3000, or quite possibly later called The Love of Two Locomotives for the Station Master (1925).  While researching this dance, the Italian Futurists, and their vision of a world during the birth of film, airplanes and automobiles, it became clear that the past and present share many artistic similarities.  Over a century ago Marinetti declared, "Time and space died yesterday."  Today through the utilization of technologies and scientific theories in performance, it is becoming easier to see how his declaration can fully come to life. 

DOUBLE VISION's interest is not in dance alone.  Rather, we are concerned with contemporary culture as it ebbs and flows.  The group, founded in 2003, has created a large collection of choreography, events, video, music, and other works glued together by an urge to live, experience and express the now.  However, it is through dance that we are able to brush closely against one of our favorite subjects: what it is to be human.  The definition and redefinition of human-ness seems to be shifting at an increasing rate.  Are we still understood to be like the corpses Leonardo da Vinci dissected hundreds of years ago?  Would a modern day painter express the anatomical depiction of an arm without consulting the Google image database first?       

The Futurists' tin can robot dancers worked for their time.  Artists then observed a shift in what it meant to be human in a society becoming intertwined with the machine.  From these observations, some Futurists created sintesi (short works for stage) that attempted to map the motion of pulleys, cogwheels, cranks, and shafts onto the dancers through stylized, machine-like movements.  For example, in Giacomo Balla's 1914 work Macchina Tipografica, twelve performers depicted wheels and pistons of the printing press through repetitive arm movements.  Today, the task of mapping the machine to the stage presents a different challenge.  How does one translate the movement of electrons, assembly language and cyberspace into dance?  Unlike the machines of the Futurists' time, the complexity embedded in current technology has vastly increased, while becoming more transparent.  To our naked eye, the path of a million simultaneous neurons is perplexing when trying to realize them on six dancers at a Wednesday night rehearsal.   

However, our goal is not merely to map codes and algorithms into a dance, but to illuminate their meaning.  Humans may line up to get medical upgrades, to design their children, to outlast the norm, but what does this progress imply about ourselves?  Questions such as these occupy our artistic brains while working day jobs and replying to emails.  

As co-artistic directors we usually share the same concepts, beliefs, and intuitions about our work.  It is during the manifestation of the work that we don’t always see eye to eye.  For example, while creating our new work Three Canons and Mise en Scénes it became apparent that the choreography implied different meanings for both of us.  While one of us saw the dancers fighting for physical control, the other perceived the dancers exhibiting total control.  The root of the discrepancy is that we were both trying to depict an age that is in a constant state of becoming.  The time of the cogwheel is long dead. 

True to the age we live in, DOUBLE VISION is constantly upgrading, adapting, and moving.  We accept the fact that we don’t really know what will come next but strive to move forward, regardless.  Along the journey, we may find evidence of who we are as artists, dancers, music-makers or humans.  Just as the photograph of the Futurists' metal-clad dancers reminds us of who we were, we too will leave artifacts along the way depicting who we have become.


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Reviews (selected full text):


Technology Focus of Moving Meditations - Dance Review

Jennifer Noyer
Albuquerque Journal
Sunday, June 3, 2007

The Wild Dancing West contemporary dance festival ends this weekend at the North Fourth Art Center with Double Vision, from San Francisco.

Led by artistic directors Sean Clute and Pauline Jennings, Double Vision is a group of dancers, musicians, video artists and performers who explore and reinterpret Futurist ideas, creating a bridge through choreography between the human effects of earlier technology and the complex technology of today. The results were full of humor, some stunning dance and video imagery, and a few quite frightening effects.

The first half of the program focused on Italian Futurist concepts from the first decades of the 20th century, when new mechanical technologies were changing the world. Accepted ideas about time and space changed rapidly. In 1924 choreographer F.T. Marinetti said that "time and space died yesterday." Marinetti's "Machina del 3000/The Love of Two Locomotives for the Station Master" was humorously reconceived by Jennings and Clute. A Chaplinesque little man, danced by Tiffany Barbarash, waited for the train with his suitcase. When two robotic figures entered as humanized locomotive engines, they began a courtship with the little man. Barbarash achieved exaggerated comic macho gestures as she flexed muscles, did quick push-ups, and escaped. Futurists created short works for the stage to describe the motions of machinery on dancers. Clute created short videos of a fast-forward mechanical bull, and a bowling scene where movement dissolved into repeated lines, or just repeated actions back and forth in time.

"Machina Typografica," originally by Giacomo Balla, described the motions of a printing press in 1914 with 12 dancers in two rows using repetitive pushing and turning arm gestures.

"As If By Falling" was choreographed by Jennings for six dancers, designed with clear phrasing and formal development imposed on Clute's electronic sound environment. The dance opened and closed in a diagonal line from upstage right to downstage left. The dancers developed spatial designs from that line with sharp, angular gestures and fast directional changes. Occasionally, a figure would melt into a slower, curved shape, breaking the pace of machinelike movement. At one point, a figure appeared as a victim, crucified in space. The sound score gave no hints of phrasing or meter, but dancers picked up invisible clues, returning to finely constructed and sharply performed unison movement.

"Video Action Painting," a technological marvel by Clute, created a Monty Python-styled cartoon on stage, with the artist's hand designs projected, in the moment, on a video screen. It incorporated scenes from a bar with domestic scenes and voyaged from a small town to the west coast over a map, and through time, from horse-and-buggy to automobiles. I'd have to see this several times to really get with it, but it was amazing to watch.

The last dance on the program was both beautiful and frightening. Jennings' "Three Canons and Mise en Scenes (2007)" was performed to another electronic score by Clute. The first canon opened with rigid, doll-like dancers moving as though controlled by unseen forces. They would hit poses, then melt into new movement variations. Musical excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 evolved within the score, increasing in volume, or completely disappearing in the third canon as the dancers transformed their movement into more classical lines and shapes. Here the lighting design became the dominant emotive factor. Ben Coolik was able to dissolve solid matter in front of the audience's eyes as figures were broken up visually into light fragments, like pixels, finally disappearing in darkness. Can technology wipe us all out? Wipe out art? It was worth thinking about and amazing to watch.

 

DOUBLE VISION creates an ironic gallery of

interactive scnarios at CELLspace

Jamie Windborne
Editor
Arts Extra!
Sunday, June 4, 2006

 

MISSION DISTRICT — The CELLspace gallery opened into a galactic playground of the imagination where the doorway to a collaborative art group's performance created an electro-wonderland of socio-political proportions. A spontaneous combustion of colliding performances, including cheerleaders racing against themselves through space and time, cowboys and angels roping viewers into a hit-and-run hoedown, and a stranded scientist seeking exile from his lunar setting, redefined performance art into an ironic gallery of interactive scenarios.

Hosted at CELLspace on Friday, May 26, Double Vision's "Evolutionary Patterns and the Lonely Owl (Mutation #2)" created a performance experience for both artist and observer that allowed the audience to roam freely to explore multiple layers of performances, environments, and installations.

Directed by Sean Clute and Pauline Jennings, Double Vision's artists forged a balance between unity, complexity, and chaos as visitors roamed freely through an environment of performance, dance, music, video and technology. Jennings, co-director of Double Vision, explained that the collaboration wanted to foster an environment where no discussion is required, only the creation of a shared performance.

"The interesting thing that happens, is that even when interaction between the various pieces is not planned, it naturally occurs," she said. "Just as a pedestrian walking down the street may be influenced by a horn honking or a pigeon crossing it's path, whether the horn interrupts their thoughts or changes their mood and the pigeon changes their path, all performers (and attendees) at these events undergo similar experiences constantly as light, sound and physical space changes."

In Jennings's interactive piece, "Ample Autonomous Accumulators", which includes performance artists Wendy Marrinaccio and Cecelia Peterson, three dancers race against time, space, memory and each other. The performers encourage audience members to place wagers, follow the scorecard and attempt to impede or help the performers, in what Pauline describes as "the tension of overall competition of trying to co-exist."

Artist Jason B. Jones played Dr. Stranded, who communicated with visitors from inside an inflatable moon with lights and body gestures. Jones said that the theme of isolation was used to have very intimate contact with people where freedom and a barrier simultaneously exist. "We can have close contact but less interaction with each other," he said. "You can get very close to people, but still be very distant from them. It's about isolation, but how you communicate through that and make a connection."

Other performance works and installations featured constructions by Marielle Amrhein, Steven Baudonnet, Matt Bell, Liz Bootz, Sean Clute, Amanda Crawford, Brian Enright, Simran Gleason, Jammin' Ammon, Ron Goldin, Jessica Gomula, Elisabeth Kohnke, Chris Kruzic, Amy Leonards, Michelle K. Lynch, Amy Nielson, Tim Thompson, Bill Wolter, and Nicole Zvarik.

One of Lonely Owl's production goals is to create an ensemble of artists interested in blurring the boundaries between their different media, according to Jennings. "Each mutation of the series has granted more control to the artist, and less to a centralized authority and more freedom to choose the level of interactivity they desire," she said.

 

Disembodied Head No. 2 and 3

Hilary Burke
Producer
The Meaning of the 21st Century

 

This past year, Double Vision performed their post-modern audio-visual performance piece Disembodied Head for the documentary series The Meaning of the 21st Century, which is currently in production and is scheduled to air in September 2005 on PBS....

...Disembodied Head is a pinnacle example of the crossover of modern dance with audio/visual components. This demonstrates the parallel movements in art with technology. Technology has become such an embedded aspect of today's society and now art is being transformed by this same technology. Disembodied Head became the visual complement to Dr. Shlain's discussion....Double Vision's innovative routine and mix of audio/visual techniques was exactly what we wanted to apply to the interview to achieve a cutting-edge documentary never seen before on television.

It is my hope that more people who are artists as well as those who have no background in art or dance have the opportunity to view the work of Double Vision. Their enthusiasm and interest in our project not only raised the bar for our production, but also allowed us to be a part of a new and evolving style of art.

 

"13 Dreams of a Dying Clairvoyant"

The Oakland Metro
Oct. 29, 2004
By Bonner Odell

 

Seven choreographers, five video artists, ten musical composers, and over 40 performers in one night. Any would-be viewer might well ask how much unity such an evening of multi-media extravagance could achieve. Surprisingly, the answer is a lot.

The most remarkable aspect of "13 Dreams of a Dying Clairvoyant," presented by the experimental multi-media performance group Double Vision at the Oakland Metro on Friday, Oct. 29th is the unity of vision among its teeming cast. That and the on-going nature of the three hour-plus performance, which bled seamlessly from dance performance to band appearance to video projection in repeating cycles, leaving the audience to wonder how the performers kept track of what came next.

The ringmaster of this dark circus was the Clairvoyant himself, a shiftless bandit-eyed character dressed in a tuxedo, red gloves, and red shoes who wandered around the performance space in a seeming effort to both evoke and escape the unfolding of the 13 dreams which made up the evening's performance. Staggering among seven or so boxes of opaque mesh stretched over flexible pipe which housed the dancers until their recurring entrances, the clairvoyant progressed from a timid and somewhat self-conscious approach to his dreamscape to a lurching, aggressive agitation of his own disturbing visions. The progression was no doubt aided by the increasing amounts of alcohol he consumed, first via flask extracted periodically from his cumber bun, and later bottles of beer ordered mid-performance from the bar. The result of his intoxication was a much more convincing madman whose possessed rocking of the boxes seemed to inspire increased frenzy in the dancers.

If this whole scene strikes you as oddly comical and disturbing at the same time, you're starting to get a taste for Double Vision, a multi-media performance group which "strives to push the boundaries of dance, music, video, and art by creating immersive environments that involve technology and unconventional spaces." True to its mission, "13 Dreams" offers an orgiastic experience for all six senses. The program invites audience members to travel through the performance space, touch, lean on, and manipulate the ominous boxes, walk among the slip-clad performers, and gain varying perspectives of the film & video projections on every wall as well as musicians lurking above the bar, behind the audience, and inside the main door.

Described as "an intermedia exploration of life and death," "13 Dreams" displays the wide and varied talents of a host of Bay Area artists including directors Pauline Jennings, a recent MFA graduate in dance, and Sean Clute, a musician and video artist with whom Jennings began collaborating at Mills College in 2003. Several other Mills dance alumni contributed choreography in the form of individual "dreams," of which Angelina Nicole's "Dreamatorium" stood out for its eccentric partnering, Amy Nielson's "This is the End of my Dream" for its striking costumes, and "Dreams Reassembled," by Dena Bermann, Liz Bootz, and Pauline Jennings for its dynamic use of group choreography.

A video installation by Clute and Jennings, featuring an Escher-like morphing of birds and tree limbs into pixilated stills and juxtaposed with the slow-motion explosion of a mushroom cloud, offered a particularly beautiful and terrifying vision. An Apple-manipulated sound score served as moving accompaniment, while Wally Scharold's dissonant "Recurring Dreams of Rotting Teeth," performed live by musicians Sam Ospovat, Rob Pumpelly, and Scharold himself, evoked reactions in keeping with its title.

While the black and white plastic masks, haunted, erratic dancing and video, and discordant music made a powerful unified statement, it's impossible to say what that statement was. Webster's defines clairvoyance as "acute intuitive insight or perceptiveness," but the central character's 13 dreams conveyed not insight but confusion, not perceptiveness but madness and fragmentation. Unless Double Vision intends annihilation as the fate of the clairvoyant or the world at large, "13 Dreams" needs more than formal unity to convey any kind of insight; it needs thematic unity as well. Herein lies the challenge for this emerging performance group: to take their varied and laudable talents and combine them into cohesive, meaningful works of art that stand on their own merits, rather than those of their disparate components. In the meantime, the sheer scope and ambition of "13 Dreams" points to Double Vision's potential, making the group an exciting new addition to the Bay Area arts scene to watch in the coming year.