TILT

is a videodance film by choreographer Paula Josa-Jones and video artist Ellen Sebring, with dancers Ingrid Schatz, Alissa Cardone and Josa-Jones. TILT explores the fragile nature of balance, the tenuous cord with which we are tethered to a sense of normalcy, the rupture of change without warning, and the abrasion of world events upon our lives. Two women teeter along a sea wall, coats buffeted by wind into shapes of flight. The wall falls away and imparts an unstable gravity which redefines the dancers' movement as they negotiate their tenuous grip and are thrust into a world with new physical laws.

Josa-Jones began to conceive the project in the early spring of 2001. She asked Sebring to join her in filming two dancers walking along the sea wall near her Martha’s Vineyard home. The camera circled around the dancers, creating the illusion that the ground itself was swaying. Following the events of September 11, 2001, their work seemed well times to reflect the internal turbulence that the nation was experiencing. The film was later shown at the 2004 Dance on Camera Festival in New York City.

Artists Josa-Jones and Sebring wanted to bring TILT to life onstage as well as onscreen. Balance, grace and agility are all qualities a dancer seeks, but what happens when the dance adds a mechanism designed to disrupt the level plane and shift gravity? The result is a performance that combines large-screen video, live dancers, and a gravity disrupting mechanism called a "levitron," designed by MIT faculty member, Geoff Benson.

MIT’s Kinaesthetics Lab was issued a mechanical-engineering challenge. It wasn’t to design a solar-powered car or a remote-controlled robot, but to build a swaying dance platform. The challenge came as Paula Josa-Jones, a Boston-based choreographer, and Ellen Sebring, a research associate in MIT’s Visualizing Cultures project, worked to build a dance based on the concepts of “altered" gravity and lost balance.

"The idea was to experiment with ways to mirror the 'tilt' effect, created by camera movement in the videotape, on stage," said Sebring, who notes that when gravity is disrupted the dancers are thrown out of balance, evoking new types of dance movement. "We hope to get some ideas as to how to build a more sophisticated levitron in the future."

TILT.com