Erglines/Waterchords, 2012 (work in progress)
Co-director/video: Angie Eng
Co-director/performance artist (Waterchords): Jessica Higgins
Choreography: Jessica Higgins
Composer/musician: Cheryl Leonard
Text: Jessica Higgins
Max programmer (Erglines): Matthew Ostrowski
Max advisor(Erglines):  Thomas Martinez

supported in part by a Harvestworks residency from SwitchTV, and a residency from Clocktower Gallery

ERGlines is a multimedia performance that was initially inspired by the desert and branched out into a 2 part series: the desert (ERGlines) and water (Waterchords)  This one-hour performance includes dance, poetry, live video, acoustic/electronic and interactive sound/image.

ERGlines is concerned with repetitive patterns seen in wind trails, audio patterns and cosmic cycles. Choreography is built between the movements of performer and video. The event is structured between virtual and physical image. A horizontal sweep, a spinning frame, a flickering echo of the hand is in response to Higgin’s actions. At other moments the audience’s attention is redirected and immersed in the mapped projections.

Live Video

In Erglines, video serves as a reflection of time as well as an architectural element that emits spatial rhythms in dialogue with the music and dance. Present, past and future is projected onto surfaces: walls, objects, performance artist. Macro camera framing of the performer’s gestures are pre-recorded and mixed with live camera capture of a bird’s eye view.  Eng uses live video to describe variations of reality that transcend linear time.

Moving image departs from the flat rectangular virtual image. It becomes a moving light object. Video multiplies and transforms into a spinning cloud that spirals with the performance artist’s repetitive gestures. We witness the artists’ perspective of the desert: an infinite expanse, a heightened sensibility inside subtleties, a current that carves out its path, leaving traces of its transgression, a minute detail that explodes and dominates our attention. Illusion, then what is real disappears, becomes a shadow, a reflection and then cycling into a backdrop again.