Internet2 Member Community Performances
Many exciting and innovative performances have been produced by Internet2 member universities and their collaborators.
The Adding Machine
Bradley Univeristy Theater's The Adding Machine
Four institutions collaborated to perform Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine as part of Bradley University Theatre’s performance season. The project joined students, faculty, and staff from the Department of Theatre Arts and the Multimedia Program at Bradley University with students, faculty, and staff from the University of Waterloo and the University of Central Florida to collaboratively develop, rehearse, and present a fully mediatized production--integrating virtual scenery broadcast video via Internet2, recorded video, avatar performers, photographs, graphics and sound--of The Adding Machine. Learn more.
Tresspassing Boundaries
The Arts Technology Group at NYU has been an advocate and technical integrator for Internet2 applications in the arts since the inception of Internet2. Highlights have included the first Internet2 distributed musical "The Technophobe and The Madman," international collaboration in educational theater, a series of dance/video art/music performances with UC Irvine including "Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope" in response to the events of 9/11, and some of the first uses of Internet2 for performance art.
Trespassing Boundaries was a collaborative performance that took place simultaneously in New York and in Tel Aviv on 10 November 2005, with Internet2 technology serving as a site-less location in which artists from different locations and cultural backgrounds collaborated and exchanged their various cultural histories, memories and gestures of renewal. This performance, part of Barbara Rose-Haum's "Torn Texts" series, originated in two biblical portions that were read during the week of November 10 (Kristallnacht). Relying on the story of the tower of Babylon and the conflict between Sarah and Hagar, Trespassing Boundaries recoded and re-perform ed their mythical, and therefore limiting, systems of signification. On a set resembling a deserted archaeological site of Jerusalem, the performance dealt with concepts of longing for and destroying a home, construction and loss of national and personal identities, language as a barrier, holy texts as markers of sameness and difference, the relations between gendered territory and conquering the land, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
InterPlay: Hallucinations
On
23-25 April 2004, the
Another Language Performing Arts Company presented InterPlay:
Hallucinations, featuring performances by actors
Toni Larimer, Aaron Henry, and Beth Miklavcic in a theatre/video
work titled The Surface of Things. This work consisted
of three video streams that were combined with two video streams
from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks featuring the talents
of percussionist Scott Deal and animator Miho Aoki, and two video
streams from the University of Maryland, College Park featuring
the talents of dancer Brian Buck and video artist Nadja Masura.
The seven video streams were assembled simultaneously and mixed
live by director Jimmy Miklavcic.
The live performance took place simultaneously at the University of Utah, University of Alaska, Fairbanks and University of Maryland, College Park, and was also streamed to the Access Grid for viewing by virtual participants.
Manhattan School of Music Jazz Combo Virtual Performance
Manhattan School of Music—in collaboration with Columbia
University—presented a jazz
combo virtual performance over Internet2's Abilene Network
as part of National
Internet2 Day on 18 March 2004. The jazz performance was multicast
live to more than 35 National Internet2 Day participation sites
and also webcast live on the commodity Internet. Following the
jazz performance, the National Internet2 Day featured a performing
arts panel discussion, highlighting topics such as bringing connectivity
into a theater or venue, producing remote master classes, presenting
multi-site performances, and providing educational outreach in
the arts and humanities. The panel was moderated by Ann
Doyle, Internet2 program manager for Arts & Humanities
Initiatives, panel presenters included:
- Thomas Knab, Case Western Reserve University
- Christianne Orto, Manhattan School of Music
- Louis Brown, Manhattan School of Music
- Tom Snook, New World Symphony
- Benton Hess, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
- Ramon
Ricker, Eastman School of Music, University
of Rochester
more…
Non Divisi
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| Images courtesy of the University of Florida's Digital Worlds Institute. |
Attendees at the Fall 2003 Internet2 Member Meeting were treated to a performance demonstration of an intercontinental dance and music collaboration between the University of Florida Digital Worlds Institute and participants on three continents. The piece, entitled Non Divisi—a musical term meaning "not divided"—is part of ongoing work at the Digital Worlds Institute in growing an international network of Access Grid nodes and bringing together Internet2 members interested in creating new works of multi-national music and dance. The performances of Non Divisi occurred during both the Internet2 meeting and the Seoul International Dance Festival, and joined artists in Korea with performers in North and South America in demonstrating how telepresence can effectively empower multi-national collaborations in the performing arts.
In addition to the team of engineers and artists at the Digital
Worlds Institute, Non Divisi collaborators included Indiana
University, the New World School of the Arts (NWSA) Miami, Red Universitaria
Nacional (REUNA) in Chile, Sejong University and the Korean Advanced
Institute of Technology (KAIST) in Korea and Internet2 engineers.
During the performances, which took place at the Indiana State Museum,
dance soloist Kelly Drummond Cawthon performed on stage in collaboration
with live ensembles and engineers from the University of Florida
(UF), New World School of the Arts, Sejong University and KAIST.
Percussionists in Chile rehearsed and performed in real time with
faculty from the UF School of Music, providing the live musical 
accompaniment
that united the dancers over a combined distance of some 12,000
miles. The Indiana audiences witnessed the event via both the Access
Grid and MPEG-2 video streamed from VBrick
Systems encoders located in Chile, Korea, and Florida. According
to Mike Savic, Director of Marketing at VBrick Systems, “VBrick
was delighted to play a role in this international collaboration.
Live performances such as these are not possible without the DVD-quality
video and CD-quality audio provided by MPEG-2 video conferencing.”
Savic continued, “An additional benefit is the ‘plug
and play’ nature of these products, which allowed the participants
in Chile and Korea to get their VBricks running smoothly in just
a couple of days.”
more...
DancingQ Performance Event
Prof. Myung Sook Kim and collaborators used advanced networking technologies to create and host one of the world's most successful cyber-performances over the Internet. On 9 September 2003, Prof. Kim led her dance company Nulhui in a 90-minute performance at the National Theater for Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul, South Korea. The performance consisted of four scenes: worshipping the Buddha with six holy presents, dance of a female monk, crane dance, and a white creek. The performance was captured using three HD cameras and streamed using Digital Video Transport System (DVTS). DVTS, a leading Internet video streaming technology with a bandwidth of 30 Mbps, provides professional broadcast quality video and audio. The entire 90 minute performance was also multicast over Internet2's Abilene Network to several advanced research and education networks of the world including APAN (Asia-Pacific Advanced Network). more...
CyberSImps Improv Performance Event
Stanford University’s CyberSImps performance connected five theatrical improvisers at Stanford with four performers at UCLA for a live, distributed improv event. Interacting over low-latency, high-bandwidth audio and video streams, the improvisers created live scenes with performers more than 400 miles away. Over the course of the performance the group improvised several radio plays with voices from different stages and with live sound environments provided by UCLA’s Visualization Portal. All of the scenes involved characters in both locations. In the spirit of an improv show, the audience was also asked for suggestions and audience volunteers were invited on stage to perform with the improvisers. Daniel Walling, a member of the SoundWIRE research group at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), directed CyberSImps as part of his honors research. According to Walling, “Transmission technologies prior to Internet2 have been unable to support the sensitive communication that enables theatrical improvisers to work together.” The audio connection for CyberSImps was supported by the StreamBD software, created by the SoundWIRE research group at CCRMA; the video was supported by OpenMash. SoundWIRE receives funding and support from the National Science Foundation.
Dancing Beyond Boundaries
 |
Photo courtesy of Rick Hauser
for DancePartners© |
A
live dance performance was held on November 14, 2001 in conjunction
with SC2001.
The performance, titled Dancing
Beyond Boundaries, was a production
of the University of Florida´s Digital
Worlds Institute. Digital Worlds Executive
Director Dr. James Oliverio describes in this RealPlayer
clip how this collaborative performance
was staged live in four different locations using the Access Grid
and high-performance networks. Dancing Beyond Boundaries was featured in The
Chronicle of Higher Education.
Congratulations
to Digital Worlds, one of the three winners of
the High Bandwidth Challenge at SC2001!
World's First Remote Barbershop Quartet
"4 Men, 5 Cities, 1 Moment of History" features a delightful recap of the world´s first remote barbershop quartet, presented at the Fall 2000 Internet2 Member Meeting in Atlanta. This article, written by Brian Lynch and featured in the July/August edition of Harmonizer magazine, describes how Bob Dixon used videoconferencing to bring together these live performers: Brent Gerber from North Dakota State University, Jo Knox from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Kent Bradshaw from Syracuse University, and Greg Economides (shown in the accompanying photo) from Texas A&M University.
The Technophobe & The Madman
February 20, 2001 marked another milestone in the use of advanced networking when artists at New York University in Manhattan and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York performed on the same stage. The 60 minute presentation of The Technophobe & The Madman took advantage of OC-3 local loops and NYSERNet's OC-12 network to span the 160 mile distance between Troy and Manhattan.
The event seamlessly linked actors and musicians at both universities into single musical presentation while audiences at both sites were able to see and hear the performance as a single show. The project was developed to demonstrate the possibilities of performance on Internet2 networks. Preparation for the event required the collaborative efforts of technical staff at both campuses along with assistance from NYSERNet to ensure this successful debut. The artists and directors also worked over a period of six months staging numerous rehearsals where the artists were in two places at once allowing the producers and collaborators to explore new and meaningful ways in which to uniquely use this new medium.
This work was commissioned by Harvestworks with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, refer to this press release.
