concept
GREG POND + BANNING BOULDIN

choreography + movement direction
BANNING BOULDIN

research + dance performances
BECCA HOBACK + EMMA MORRISON

sculptures
GREG POND

sound installation
CÉSAR LÉAL + JESSICA USHERWOOD

Inspired by architects Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics, Greg and Banning adapted concepts rooted in the deconstruction and recomposition of architectural theories to develop a new “language” for generating cross-disciplinary works of dance, video, sound, and sculpture.

From 2017-2018, their collaborations using motion capture technology resulted in the creation of numerous sculptures, 3-D models, and multi-disciplinary performance installations throughout Tennessee. The project was selected for Art Prize 10 in Grand Rapids, MI, and was named “Best Dance Performance” of the year by the Nashville Scene in 2018.

“Architecture is nothing but frozen music, music is nothing but liquid architecture.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Stills taken from motion scans

By applying improvisational dance techniques to concepts of architecture, Greg and Banning explored how rule games develop sculpture through motion.

Dancers worked to identify and project anatomical and geometric limits according to dictated rules. Each time a dancer found such a limit, the limit was noted and used as a retroactive starting point. From that point began the collaborative process of incrementally unfolding the dancers’ movements to find its parent shape or form. Once found, that parent shape was then recorded and—by means of computer code—interpolated into an object, sound, or image. By repeating this process, the team created continuously unfolding sets of dances or objects.

In other words, Banning and Greg starting adapting parametric algorithms and principles intended for new architectural design to create dance, sculpture, images, and sound. There was an intentional and inevitable impossibility in the attempt to conform—or migrate—the inherent modes of each medium: the material, conceptual, or bodily constraint of one to the others.

The initial dance research investigated the impact of intensive and extensive properties of matter, coherence, and incoherence on the human body through improvisational tasks. These tasks were both sensation-based (illustrating qualitative states such as density, sharpness, softness, translucence, etc) and form-driven (exploring changes in scale, fragmentation, collapsing points in the body, unfolding to extrude lines and curves, etc).

Banning applied these modalities to individuals and groups of dancers. Greg then 3D scanned the dancers to generate sculptures, drawings, and sounds that illustrated both the dancers’ physical histories and the impact of the prompts on the multiple disciplines of our project. The scanning was accomplished using computer code written by Pond and computer programmers Marianne Sanders and Charles Stehno.

The project generated two live performances at Zeitgeist art gallery, along with a compendium of printed images, videos from the 3D motion capture drawing computer program, sculptures and sound installations.

EXIBITIONS

THE JUDO of COLD COMBUSTION

In his introductory essay to Atlas of Novel Tectonics entitled “The Judo of Cold Combustion,” Sanford Kwinter describes the process of the finding “the unfolding geometry that previously was either held in exquisite or frozen suspense or was subject to the instantaneous and uncontrolled unfolding that we know as explosion”.  By finding this middle ground “… a rhythm of unfolding that delivers the geometries of matter to the senses in the form of properties, qualities, or affects in real time, endows the world with novelty…it is best not to bury novelty too deeply in the murky mysticism of “invention” but to raise it affirmatively as a product of a spontaneous - or deliberate –…. migration of what current philosophical parlance calls the diagram… an invisible matrix, a set of instructions, that underlies… and organizes- the expression of features in any construct.”

B I O S

Greg Pond is a graduate of The University of the South, Sewanee and earned his MFA from The University of Georgia. He is currently on faculty at The University of the South, Sewanee and has been awarded Tennessee State Individual Artist grant, is a recent Kennedy Fellow at the University of the South, and has been an artist in residence at the F+F School of Art in Zurich and the Burren College of Art in Ireland. Greg also works as an independent writer, curator, and lecturer with recent projects and events hosted by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Fivemyles Gallery in Brooklyn, Delta Axis in Memphis, the Frist and Cheekwood Museums of Art in Nashville.

Banning Bouldin is a graduate of The Juilliard School. She is the founder and artistic director of New Dialect. 

César Leal is a Colombian born conductor and musicologist. He is currently the artistic director and conductor of the Sewanee Symphony Orchestra in Sewanee, TN, where he also serves as faculty member of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival. He has led ensembles across the U.S., Panama, Colombia, France, and the Ukraine; has recorded works by several Latin American composers; and has presented scholarly papers in the U.S., Canada, Greece, Japan, Italy, France, England, Peru, Colombia, and Switzerland.

Jessica Usherwood is an active performer and soloist. She earned a doctorate in voice performance and literature from the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University; a professional diploma in opera and master’s degree in voice performance and vocal pedagogy from the Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University; and a bachelor’s degree from Lee University. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN.

Becca Hoback is a dance artist based in Nashville and a founding member of New Dialect.

Emma Morrison is a dance artist based in Nashville and a founding member of New Dialect

W O R K S

The Triangle
First Fruit
Girls
Third Voice
Guncotton
Heap
Atlas Kid
Two Yous
Nocturne
Emin

NAVIGATION