Double Vision is an intermedia performance group that creates contemporary dance, music, video and interactive technology that has been based in San Francisco since 2003. There are two artistic directors, Sean Clute and Pauline Jennings.
Over the weekend I sat down with Wendy Marinaccio, who has been a dancer with Double Vision for five years and has worked as their managing director for several performances. Here is some of that interview:
Q: Tell me a little about your background in dance and how you came to be working with Double Vision.
Marinaccio: I started dancing when I was very very small. I was five and I took ballet, it is probably a story that you’ve heard a lot before. I was a ballet minor when I was doing my undergrad. That is when I started doing modern dance and dancing in modern dance companies. For graduate school I went to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and I studied dance but from the theoretical perspective.
I found Pauline and Sean totally by accident, on a craigslist audition post, it might not have been craigslist, it might have been a Dancers’ Group post. I had never heard of Double Vision before but it sounded perfect immediately.
I was busy during the scheduled audition so Pauline auditioned me all by myself and it was the most tiring two hours of my life.
I could tell right away that Pauline and I got along really well and that the company was really artistically similar to what I was looking for, our atheistic matches up really well.
Q: How much collaboration is there between the dance and other artists?
Marinaccio: It is kind of a collective in a way of a lot of different types of artists. The dance company is the core group, just by virtue of being a dance company we have to see each other all the time. However, there are all these other artists, like composers, musicians, video artists and technology people who make cool interactive things.
We will often do shows that are more like exhibits, like on-going performances that involve all of these people and their projects and everything is happening at the same time. It makes it really exciting; it’s not a regular dance company.
Q: You completed a US tour in 2008. What is that process like? Is there are particular place or performance that sticks out in your mind?
Marinaccio: We did twelve cities in five weeks and I can’t remember how many performances but it was more then twelve, we did several performances each place we stopped. We meet so many people along the way and performed in some great houses. The tour really started setting the company up for the next step.
We started planning the tour a year in advance. We had a group of five dancers, Pauline and Sean, a few musicians and other collaborators who were interested in coming along. So at times we had ten people on tour, in three cars.
It was in some ways really glamorous and in some ways really not glamorous, we slept on couches in a lot of places, we were setting up the screens ourselves in lots of places with no time to warm up, but it was really incredible.
One of the really cool things about it, that is not related to the dance side of things, was that it just happened to be in September and October right before the presidential election and we just happen to be going through almost every swing state, it was really interesting.
There was a really cool show we did on the tour at the University of Arizona; we did a residency there for a week. They have a beautiful stage there, it was really stunning, and in the mornings we would take class with their dance students and then we would rehearse on the stage. We did some master classes for them, which was really cool, we really got to know them while we were there.
One of the pieces that we did was done especially for them, we worked with one of their professors to create piece which used an infrared camera that we would dance with, so we had gloves on that had sensors which would direct the cameras and the music. At the time it was the only camera of its kind and luckily one of the dancers and her husband work at Logitech and so they had this specialized equipment and the knowledge to help create it. It was really cool to premiere not only a new piece in a great venue and create those relationships but also to be using this super cool new thing. It was an awesome show.
Q: What can you tell me about the upcoming performance?
Marinaccio: It is the first time that we are doing one piece that is a full evening. We’ve done several home seasons in the past but they have had like maybe three or four pieces on the bill and this time it is one full evening piece. It is a big step and it is going to be 70 minutes long.
Double Vision will be performing “Hysteresis” from April 9th through the 11th at Dance Mission Theatre.
[...] multimedia (photos and videos in this case) as well as plenty information about the company (Click here and here for posts I have done about Double [...]