TO/FROM is a multimedia performance developed as a collaboration between Site-Specific Dances and composer and multi-instrumentalist Darian Donovan Thomas and filmed at the height of the Covid pandemic. The immersive staging of this work premiered in New York City at the Paul Taylor Dance Studios on April 6, 2023.
Set in the Old Mission and Leelanau peninsulas of northwestern Michigan in August of 2020, at the peak of the Covid pandemic which brought an end to Michael Spencer Phillips 20-year long dance career, this video performance is highly personal. Phillips is returning home to rural Michigan after a long city career as a professional dancer, while his former student, Falconer, is returning home to Michigan after college. The performance is a reflection on moments of great transition in life - much like the metamorphosis of dancers into the myriad of vocations they take on after a life devoted to performance. The movement studies for “TO/FROM” were developed in settings as diverse as dunes, water, groves of trees, and fields and attempt to juxtapose the movement of human body with the vastness of wilderness landscapes, while also inviting landscapes, and the special effects of the natural world, to participate in the experiment.
DIRECTOR: Michael Spencer Phillips DANCERS: MIchael Spencer Phillips, Madison Falconer MUSIC: Darian Donovan Thomas CAMERA AND DRONE: Michael Spencer Phillips EDITING: Emma Kazaryan PRODUCERS: Michael Spencer Phillips and Dino Kiratzidis
To/From was commissioned by the Traverse City Dance Project.
The Exhibition Design for To/From disintegrates the planar quality of white ‘gallery’ walls with two shifting layers of video - one static, and the other slowly moving in space, oscillating between foreground and background. Exactly once, they lock into alignment. Similar to optical techniques used in Baroque architecture to create the perception of a ‘deeper’ and more dramatic space than the one that physically exists, the scenic design suggests an expanded space around the audience in which the video ‘floats’.
At one point the slowly retreating video plane is reduced to a small thumbnail, revealing a vast space, stretching to infinity.
