Country Roads Magazine "Performing Arts Issue" September 2021

IMMERSIVE PERFORMANCE

Remnants

RETHINKING PERFORMANCE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION

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By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

n 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.

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?”

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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

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

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

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 per-

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forming 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, BODYART 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.”