Experiencing Interruptions?

SYLPHIDES 3.1

Sylphides 3.0 is a collection of 1/1 videos created by mixing and hybridizing dance with 3D simulations and animations. Title numbering refers to Web 3.0, and each item in the collection receives a subsequent numbering: 3.1, etc.

However, it is not just a form of organization. The number has to do, above all, with being on the Web 3.0, moving around and creating dances in it. How to dance in Web 3.0? How to reprocess the revolution erupted by the relationship between dance and 3D simulation? How to start in a new language? How to start over?

Back to the start. Genesis: the beginning of a story. A return to the past to look to the future.

The name of the collection is a direct citation to Germanic mythology, and especially to works of great importance in the dance history: “La Sylphide” (1832) and “Les Sylphides” (1909). The pieces are used as a starting point to provoke the relationships and similarities between the classic and the contemporary, and to reflect on what is yet to come in the future of Art, in general, and of Dance, in particular. New bodies, new dances?

The aesthetic and artistic elements explored in the sylphs of previous centuries through airy female figures with revolutionary and abstract dances on tiptoe are now reworked based on new protocols, new codes and new paradigms provoked by Web 3.0, by sci-fi and biofuturism. Other bodies, other dances.

The figure of the feminine, romantic, air genie, vaporous, enigmatic and superhuman sylph gives way to androgynous figures, neither masculine nor feminine, decentralized, with simulated physics, soft parts, procedural choreographies, disjointed movements and articulations hyperflexibles. Hyperhumans. Several bodies. Various dances.

Item 3.1 of the collection presents 200 sylphs in embryological form. Various elements of the language of dance, such as the waltz, the wheel, the control, the support point, the mobility of the joints and the relationship with gravity were submit to the logic of animation and 3D simulation, such as soft bodies, plastic bodies, expansion and contraction of force fields, fluids, winds, low gravity and impulsive surfaces. Thus, there is a collective ballet body, with a single pulse, but with particular focuses and dismemberments, exploring the relationship of classical ballet elements with modern and contemporary dances. The work is accompanied by an original historical recording, published in 1916, of “Les Sylphides”, by Ballets Rus Serguei Diaghilev.

Sylphides 3.1 has been featured at the following events, projects and schedules: moveMINT NYC: The Experience; NFT São Paulo; Origen Videodance Festival; Movimentale Audiovisual Festival; International Meeting on Video-dance and Video-performance; Dance & Performance Arts Gallery by Misja NederDans; Naw Talks Neosutras Metaverse; Sardinia Film Festival; Cuerpo Mediado Videodanza Festival; International Videodance Festival of RS; Eku'e International Videodanza Exhibition in Asunción; Serbest International Film Festival; LATAM ART on Open Metaverse; Imajitari – International Dance Film Festival; International Screendance Festival of Chile; Dança em Foco Festival; Festivalito Rodante Internacional de Choreocinema; International NFT Competition (7th place); Context.Film Festival; Digital Art Biennial Brazil; Future Vision Festival; Moovy Tanzfilmfestival.

  • Diego Mac
    Director
  • Frédéric Chopin
    Music
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Web / New Media
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    May 23, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    Brazil
  • Country of Filming:
    Brazil
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Diego Mac

Artist. Dance director. Choreographer. Dancer. Video artist. 3D artist. Producer and cultural manager. Doctoral Researcher in Performing Arts. Currently, he dedicates himself to artistic creation based on mixing the language of dance with animation and 3D simulation techniques, blockchains, metaverses and NFTs. He was selected to exhibit his work at the NFT.NYC event, received the 2022 Açorianos de Dança Award as Personality of the Year for his innovative 3D dance work, and was awarded the Cultural Trajectories Award for the development of his artistic work.

Working for 25 years in the cultural and entertainment field in artistic projects that move between dance, popular culture, images, technology, creativity, management and entrepreneurship. Director of Macarenando Dance Concept. Artistic director of Muovere Dance Company. Graduated in Dance. Master and specialist in Visual Poetics. Began professional career in 1997, having worked on more than 300 cultural projects. His work is recognized on the local and national scene, with more than 20 awards received.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I have been working with dance for 25 years, so the poetics, projects, practices, materials, and processes were multiple and diverse: from the relationship between dance and comedy, through the articulation with technology and videodance, to culminate today in the meeting of dance with 3D simulation and animation. One of my biggest goals as a dance artist is to discover creative strategies and formal solutions capable of revealing an expanded and democratic notion of dance, in which it occurs not only in the standard human-body, thin, hard and muscular, but also in other bodies, including non-human ones, establishing other and different perspectives for what dance and bodies that dance can be. In this sense, there were several results: from the video dance Pas de Corn (2006), whose dancers are popcorn, through the webdance O Colecionador de Movimentos, to the recently published work Sylphides 3.0, based on the creation of bodies and movements in simulation 3D.

With this approximation of dance and 3D, I keep asking: how to dance in Web 3.0? How to choreograph in the metaverse? How to reprocess the revolution brought about by the relationship between dance and 3D simulation? As a dance artist, I seek creative answers to these questions by articulating dance and 3D, NFTs, web3 and metaverses, provoking a dialogue between the classic and the contemporary and reflecting on the future of Art and Dance. When I create dances with digital materials, my whole body is involved in this process. In my body there is no distinction between physical performance and digital dance. I believe that this has to do with the future of relationships in the metaverses, with the conditions of existence and with the forms of coexistence mediated by digital technologies. Other bodies, other movements, other dances.