THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016 13
MAIN IMAGE: COURTESY EMPAC AT RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, CHARLES ATLAS, RASHAUN MITCHELL, SILAS RIENER. PHOTO: MICK BELLO; ATLAS: EPA/TONI GARRIGA
ITALIAN FLOODS
The “mud angels” who
helped to save art in the
deluges of 1966Features
Page 18Features
13
“ Shooting in 3D
is a diferent
kind of hard”
As the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
prepares for its 2017 survey of Merce
Cunningham, it has commissioned an
ambitious work from Charles Atlas, the
late choreographer’s former collaborator.
By Helen Stoilas
THE GREAT
BIOGRAPHY:
CHARLES ATLAS
Born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1949 to a housewife
and a travelling salesman, he becomes interested
in theatre production at Swarthmore College in
Pennsylvania, but leaves before graduating to move
to New York City.
In 1970, after volunteering as a stage manager
at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village,
the home of the avant-garde performance and
dance scene, he takes a job at Merce Cunningham’s
dance studio, where he designs sets, costumes and
lighting, and serves as videographer-in-residence.
He also collaborates with other choreographers,
such as Douglas Dunn and Yvonne Rainer.
In the 1980s, he moves to London, where he
works with performers such as Leigh Bowery and
the choreographer Michael Clark (his documentary
The Legend of Leigh Bowery came out in 2002).
Moving into the 1990s, he is commissioned
to create experimental video series for television
broadcasters such as PBS and the BBC, and
continues to work on episodes of the programme
ART21, for which he wins a Peabody Award in 2008.
He delves into live video-mixing in the 2000s.
His work is in the collections of New York’s
Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum
of Art, and the Centre Pompidou. He is represented
by Luhring Augustine in New York and by Vilma Gold
in London. H.S.QUANTUM LEAP
3DF
or a decade, from 1973 to
1983, Charles Atlas was the
film-maker-in-residence for
the Merce Cunningham Dance
Company, collaborating with
the choreographer and his
dancers to create a new way
of translating dance onto the
screen. So when the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis was looking to commission
new works for its major exhibition on
Cunningham opening in February 2017,
one of the artists it turned to was Atlas. The
result will be Tesseract, perhaps one of the
most technically ambitious dance recordings
ever made, incorporating 3D film, live
performance and on-the-spot video-mixing
by Atlas, working in collaboration with
two former Cunningham dancers, Rashaun
Mitchell and Silas Riener. The work is being
finished this winter at the Curtis R. Priem
Experimental Media and Performing Arts
Center (Empac) at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in Troy, upstate New York, which
co-commissioned the piece. It will premiere
at Empac in January, before being shown at
the Walker, the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago, and other venues across the
country next year.The Art Newspaper: How did this commission
come about?
Charles Atlas: Empac invited me to do the
residency. When I went up there, I wanted to do
everything. All the things I ever wanted to do,
they had [the tools] there. And then I realised
I had to narrow it down. I’ve always wanted
to do something in 3D. I tried doing live video
with dance once and it wasn’t very satisfactory
because we had no time to work on it. So I
thought this was my chance. Then I had to choose
collaborators. I wanted to work with someone I
hadn’t worked with before, and someone who
was sort of brainy also, so Rashaun and Silas were
perfect. We decided that we would do the 3D film
one year and then the next year we would work
on the live part. I always wanted it to be [shown
in] one evening all together, so it’s going to be
the 3D film for the first act and then the second
act will be the live dance with live cameras, live
[video] mixing, and projection on the scrim in
front of the dance.You’ve done lots of live video-mixing pieces.
Not with dance. I’ve done it with live
performance, with people speaking in placeor moving more or less in place. That’s easy to
do—well, not easy, but adding high-energy dance
where people are moving radically through space
is a whole diferent thing. We’re intensively
working in November, December, to make the
second part in New York and then part of the time
at Empac. Because it’s hard to work on it without
having all the equipment, you need someplace
where you can set it up and leave it, because the
setup is so complicated.Tesseract is described as a six-chapter work.
That’s the 3D film. What Silas, Rashaun and
I decided we have in common was we all like
science fiction. So we decided we’d have a science
fiction theme. A tesseract is a four-dimensional
cube. The film is really six diferent 3D worlds
that are very diferent-looking and have diferent
approaches. The live part will have more of a
through line.How are you going to approach the live
performance?
We’re heading into the unknown—really, we are.
I mean I have an idea that maybe what you see
on the screen is the quantum-world version, but
I don’t know how that might pan out, because
when you work with live video, you have a slight
delay. I mean with dance, I can really tell the
diference, especially on fast movements, that
they’re not exactly in sync. We haven’t reallydecided how we’re going to approach that, but
there’s going to be some pre-recorded movement,
and then some live capture that’s played back
later, and then some abstract stuf that will be on
the screen. The challenge is to try to meld this, to
have it be not competing with the dance but have
it be a complement to the dance.When you say you’re thinking of the
quantum world, will dancers be in two
places at once?
In the quantum world, the theory is that there
are simultaneous realities of things that happen
at the same time, but they happen in a diferent
way. The time factor is not the same—everything
is present. These are all far-out concepts that we’re
not really going to illustrate, but it’s just part of
my thinking.You’ve said that you are interested in new
technologies. Are you looking at virtual
reality at all?
I’ve been editing for a year practically on this film.
It’s very labour-intensive and time-intensive to
do what I want to do. I don’t see how you do VR
without a team. I’m basically doing this myself—I
mean, I have an assistant, but creating a 360-degree
world is so detailed, there’s so much information
that needs to go in virtual reality... I haven’t really
gone into that. I draw the line. I’d already drawn
the line at one point saying I was never going to
do 3D. Then I did. And I’m sorry that I did in a way
because I’m learning how hard it is [laughs].
I’m enjoying it. It’s just hard work. There’s a
lot of restrictions in filming in 3D that I didn’t
realise at first. Most Hollywood 3D is shot with 2D
cameras. I mean, talk about labour-intensive—teams and teams of people doing the post-
production. It’s so expensive. Shooting in 3D is a
diferent kind of hard, and I think they couldn’t
do a lot of what they want to do visually if they
had to use a stereoscopic setup.How does that work?
You have two cameras mounted together, one on
top of the other: one shooting down into a mirror
and the other one shooting straight. There’s a
lot of matching up you have to do and it’s very
delicate. And it weighs 100 pounds, the rig. One
of the shots in the film is a nine-minute-long
steadicam single shot. I never got a perfect take
because the person [carrying the camera] nearly
died at the end of every take. [laughs] They were
like: “Can you break it down to more shots?” I was
like: “No, I can’t.”
The whole thing has been really challenging
and interesting. As I said, the way it should be,
but it makes me very nervous to have to come out
with a piece at the end.Charles Atlas in 2004. Top, the dancer Rashaun
Mitchell in a production still from Tesseract, his
collaboration with Atlas and Silas Riener