The Soul Leaves Her Body is an integrated-media performance synthesizing theater, dance, live video, music and cinema into a narrative entertainment for a media-friendly, international audience.  Although contemporary in style, the performance uses a progressive thirteenth-century Chinese drama as its narrative inspiration.

The story is of a young woman betrothed, kept in her chamber by a cautious mother, who, anxious to marry her fiancée, rips her soul from her body in order to pursue him and her destiny in the city.  We plan to broaden the original text by focusing on the story’s core theme – the soul-body relationship – as it is informed by our contemporary culture of mediated electronic communication, long-distance relationships, interactive technology, and high-speed travel.

Using custom-designed video interfaces, we have been experimenting with new techniques for integrating choreography with live cameras, and have developed a movement lexicon and cinematic storyboards for a highly-integrated, physically and visually-charged performance. Using the stunning aesthetic of Hong Kong as the anchor location for our cinematic storytelling, we will follow the lead of the fourteenth-century Yüan authors as they manipulated extant fictions and current events, re-working plots and mixing characters to create a revolutionary and popularly-accessible narrative that spoke of the culturally mixed times in which they lived.

 

FOR MORE INFO:

www.thefourthefive.org
www.jennieliu.com
 

We explore integrated-media in a workshop process that is collaborative, hands-on, informed by historical research of contemporary issues, and influenced by the human emotional relationship to electronic image-making, communication, and technology.  Whether a given piece takes place in the gallery, theatre, or public space, the work is always associated with a time-based form.  We mix non-actors and technicians together with skilled dancers, musicians, and performers to tell contemporary stories in a style that audiences have not experienced before.  Surrounded by immersive images and soundscapes, we hope to gain access to a portion of the audience’s consciousness that does not require explanation, and to surround them with an environment of visual and intellectual wonder and exploration.  Frequently calling into question the boundaries between technology, performance, and sculptural installation, the work engages viewers with rich imagery and inventive uses of digestible, integrated technological innovations.

PETER FLAHERTY (Co-Creator) is a video artist and director whose work has been seen in theatres, galleries, and museums internationally.  His most recent video art project, Pass Back a Revolver, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.  Recent video installations have been shown at: Nexus Gallery (Philadelphia), Fleisher-Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), the home of Agnes Gund (President Emerita of MOMA, NYC), and MIT Media Lab.  Past theatrical video design work includes: Francois Girard’s Flight of Lindbergh & Seven Deadly Sins at Opéra National de Lyon; The Builders Association’s SuperVision, Alladeen, and Avanti (international touring); Chen Shi-Zheng’s My Life As a Fairy Tale at Lincoln Center Festival; Bang On a Can’s Lost Objects at BAM; Basil Twist’s Dogugaeshi at The Japan Society; and Complicite’s The Elephant Vanishes (international touring).  He has been a Harvard University Artist-in-Residence, and has taught courses and workshops at Yale School of Drama, CalArts, and Carnegie-Mellon.  Documentation of his work can be seen at www.thefourthefive.org
 
JENNIE MARYTAI LIU (Co-Creator) was selected amongst 150 emerging dance artists to be presented as part of Dance Theater Workshop’s ‘Fresh Tracks’ 2005, where she showed Bloodwork a fifteen minute trio. The following year, she received a Bessie Schonberg/First Light Commissioning Fund from Dance Theater Workshop to choreograph a piece for their spring season, with which she created Learning in Lower Animals.  She has worked closely with Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar’s Big Dance Theater, developing and performing The Other Here, which premiered at Japan Society in February 2007 and continued to tour internationally and nationally to venues such as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and Yerba Buena Arts Center, SF.  In May 2007, she was one of four out of 200 choreographers to compete in the final round of the ‘Award Show’- a curated competition hosted by the Joyce SoHo.  In December 2007 she presented a full production of Home Birth, at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn, which Gay City News called “hilarious, inspired and original.”  She received a BFA in Theatre from Tisch School Of the Arts, New York University.