What is What

ABOVE: an excerpt from Traffic: Chicago. "my left foot" means for the bus to speed up..

This text about Traffic I have cut and pasted from a grant proposal and modified slightly -after the jump-

THISISWHATIS "Traffic"

A traveling street performance of choreographed and improvised movement delivered to an invited audience inside a moving tour bus and happened upon by a chance audiences in the immediate vicinity.  The performance would be choreographed and improvised in relation to a shifting landscape of urban obstacles and opportunities including vehicular and pedestrian traffic, architectural form, cement surface variables and the weather.  The relationship of the invited audience to the work from a moving tour bus would be created as the artist paces the bus and the bus in turn paces the artist.  The traveling relationship is fully realized as the bus pulls over for an arranged observation of a site specific performance sequence before traveling onward with the artist to yet another location. The role of site specific architecture in relation to the position of the bus and the performer will provide unique opportunities to see urban space in alternative and unique ways.  A multimedia realtime connection between the artist and the audience on the bus will be maintained throughout the entirety of the performance event. Composed music from DJ Excess will be streamed to the bus as it also plays to Shannons headphones in the street headphones in real time synch with the bus. During potential "blindspots" where the performance becomes invisible to the traveling audience cameras on either side of the bus in the front and back rows controlled by camera operators connected to VJ Glitch's video mixer will provide live coverage of the entire street and be constantly screened on installed televisions inside the bus on constant view for its passengers. The audience on the bus and the chance audience in the street will be educated informed and entertained by the uniqueness and poetry of weightless rhythmic skateboarding to music in the street. They will observe dance like skateboarding with crutches being interspersed with more substantial dance works on crutches without a skateboard and performance art type of physicality that pushed the very definition of what dance is.   The sociological implications of an ambiguously, though definitively, physically disabled person dancing on a skateboard with crutches in the street are without a comparable measure.  Suffice it to say that the ability to observe the dancing over the stretch of blocks would give the audiences new insight into the street journeys of performance artist, dancer and director, Bill Shannon.