Tagtool

May 2009 was a busy month. Among many performances, one thing stood out: the use of the Tagtool with dancers and circus artists. These sessions were experiments, fragments of a bigger picture that is still taking shape. Here are some happy accidents on video.

This first clip shows a jam at Red Shoe Films, a studio space in east London, with Joelle Gruenberg (dance), Denis Dubotev (saxophone), Melissa Castagnetto (drums), Elffriede (igloo and ink), and myself on Tagtool. What I find especially interesting about this session is the interaction of the drawing and animation with Joelle’s slow and suspenseful dance, and the creation of a three-dimensional stage space through the inclusion of the floor and Elffriede’s Igloo in the projection area.

Next, two videos from a series of sessions at The Island, a complex of buildings around an old fire station in the centre of Bristol, which has been taken over by a group of artists and circus performers called Invisible Circus. These sessions were organised by Kate Hartoch, a long-time friend of the Tagtool project. In order to research the use of the Tagtool in a circus setting, she invited some performers to take part in our experiments.

This was a session with Tanya Sculley on Chinese Pole. Here the focus lies on timing, movement and color. None of us had heard the music track before – it was all down to alertness and sensitivity to each other’s pace.

And finally a clip with tightwire artist Alana Jones. Here we had switched to back projection, in order to have the performer and the drawing living in the same space. The white silhouette was recorded earlier, mirrored and overlayed with a separate projector.

The Tagtool, with its limitations, is a very versatile instrument for live visualizations with stage performers. As soon as there’s a physical presence on stage, the purely illustrative use looses importance in favor of creating an atmosphere around the action. The Tagtool star representing the hand of the artist, the fairy of the Doughnut Universe, is a strong presence that should not compete with the performer.