Leaning On A Horse Asking For Directions (2014)

Leaning On A Horse Asking For Directions is an investigation into visual perception through a multi-channel stereoscopic 3D (S3D) environment for exhibition, bridging BaGuaZhang martial arts and contemporary dance choreography. This international collaboration between Montreal-based Millar and Szporer, Taiwanese-American choreographer Cheng–Chieh Yu, Associate Professor, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), American dance media artist-scholar Edward Warburton, Professor, UCSC, and the Canadian-born Los Angeles-based visual artist/designer Peter Melville, highlights an engagement with research in performing arts media as an opening to new understandings of the ways the work mediates intercultural hybridity and visual perception countering popular culture understandings and representations of “Chinese martial arts,” and the shifting intercultural context of contemporary dance. The research to date has explored 3-D filmmaking as an agent of kinesthetic empathy for live performance, communicating impulse, intention, and feeling, as well as issues of spectatorship, questioning the primacy of the screen or the sense of an originary plane of action, and situating the viewer in relation to a S3D landscape, and design concerns in relation to Chinese-originated “axonometric” perspective.

Filmmakers: Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer
Choreographer and Dancer: Chen-Chieh Yu
Media Artist: Edward (Ted) Warburton
Visual Designer: Peter Melville
Performers and Dancers: Robbie Cook, Jeremy Kalin, Shel Wagner Rasch
Master Teacher in BaGuaZhang: Jason Tsou