Composer: Allan Schindler
Choreographer: Susannah Newman
Videographer: Nancy Ghertner

Dancers: Hae-Youn Chung, Kelly Krucher, Jane Marshall, Carin Moscicki, Laura Regna, Liz Roney, Leanne Schmidt, Liz Schreier, Stacy Shane, Jessica Solazzo, Derek Stratton and Curtis Uhlemann

Performance formats:
1. DV CAM
   
2. Mini DV
   
3. S-VHS tape (lowest quality; for audition purposes only; not for performance)

Through the portal of a rain-splattered train window this collaboratively conceived and realized screen dance follows a multilayered collective journey -- a dreamscape of interwoven memories, hopes, actions and emotions of several characters, and of the experience of loss. The choreography employs an expansive vocabulary of movements and gestures shaped with particular attention to foreground/background perspectives, to variations in tempi and to contrary motion. Filming included the use of head-cam and glide-cam cameras at theatre, green screen and location settings.

The composer has attempted to assimilate "naturalistic" (but computer generated) sounds (for example, of various types of rain) as an integral part of a continuously evolving thematic and harmonic framework.

The music first was constructed and edited to a rough cut of the visual imagery, then the imagery was re-rendered and edited to the music.

JPG stills

MP3 audio excerpt

This excerpt begins 5 minutes and 10 seconds into the piece and includes a musical dramatic peak of the work, accompanying multiple superimposed layers of rapid dance movement and imagery by the entire company. Then, as the music subsides to a quiet "distant roar," the visual dance imagery grows even more frenzied and complex. During the final minute and a half of the work, after this excerpt, the visual imagery and music wind their own separate but equally unrelenting paths to a denoument that many viewers/listeners have told us seems both inevitable and unanticipated.
Duration : One minute 18 seconds; size 2.4 MB ; encoding 256 kBit true stereo

Independent artist Susannah Newman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Dance at SUNY College at Brockport, artistic advisor and consultant to several New York and New Jersey professional dance companies and a co-founder of the ImageMovementSound festivals. Her choreography has been commissioned by professional companies and universities throughout the United States and in Europe. She is the designer of the LNB Headcamera System, which has been used in seven of her eleven collaborations for the IMS festivals, including Raindreams.

Nancy Ghertner studied literature and art at Colby College, which led her into the dynamics of installation art. Since receiving her M.F.A. degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Film and Video she has been teaching digital video production and experimental film workshops, and currently is an adjunct faculty member in the School of Film and Animation at R.I.T.

Raindreams was premiered on the April 28 and May 4 programs of the 2002 ImageMovementSound festival in Rochester, New York and has subsequently been performed on several venues in New York state.

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