About recoil performance group

recoil is a Copenhagen based performance group. The group was formed in 2003 by choreographer Tina Tarpgaard and composer Pelle Skovmand, with the intention of establishing collaboration between artists across genre and borders.

Through dance, live video and electronic sound, we create performances that aim to explore technology as an equal and interactive partner to the performing artist’

The nature of the collaboration between the artist is the Aorta of the performance group. The artistic profile is defined by this. By constantly reviewing and reinventing ways of dialog between the different artistic genres, we search new methods of collaboration as we believe the artistic development of the group evolves around this.

The Choreographer Tina Tarpgaard:

As a choreographer, I work from a spatial perspective. It is in the relation between the body and the space in which it is placed I get my inspiration towards rhythm, form and the relations between the dancers. An intuitive working process, which I usually contain in a very specific conceptual or visual frame.

In my current work I have focused on collaboration with software artists.
The core of this recent work is defined by the close relation between the choreographic material and motion sensitive video graphics. This very intriguing combination of expanding the motion of the body by choreographing light and darkness as well as the dancers, has been an exciting challenge to find a balanced combination between software art and the performer on stage. An expressive and surprising form that seems infinite in new possibilities.

The freedom to move across time, utilising the digital memory of the mediated space, has been one of the interesting and inspiring factors in this trans-medial work.
An other part that has interest me in my close work with partly software programming and partly the dancers bodies in the same space, is the sense of the logic that is involved. The programming language depending on the absolute logic in the code, stands in sticking contrast to the very different kind of logic used in the work with the body. And though they inspire each other. I am dedicated to continuing my search to explore and develop choreography in different frames in collaboration with artists from different fields.

The Software artist Jonas Jongejan halfdaj.dk:

I’m using software programming to make things happen based on patterns or events. Programming software gives me abilities to connect different inputs from performers, audiences and other interactive elements with each other in a logic system, and generate outputs that are being experienced by the audience.

The output is not locked to any specific domain, it can be anything from high tech video projection to motors making old robots move, or information transmitted to the audience through mobile phones and internet. For me, the strength lays within the grey zone between the physical world, and the digital. Here the software can do things that are otherwise not possible, and combine performers and audiences with otherwise purely digital information in unexpected ways.

Programming is a powerful tool for me to achieve goals, but it is important to me that it’s not the goal itself. I don’t see any purpose in art based on software by itself. It only works for me when it is used in an artistic project, where the digital interaction supports the main project. This is important to me, because I see people looking at projects with software programming in it, almost as an artistic genre, and by that, changing the way they look at it. To me it is not genre defining in any way, but is merely a question of how it is being used.
I will keep trying to learn new technologies to get inspiration to new aesthetics and possibilities, and by that not get stuck in a specific genre.

The Software artist Ole Kristensen ole.kristensen.name :

In the writing of our software we draw heavily on the online resources in the global open source communities. All the way through our development process we publish the intellectual property that drives our interactive scenography. In this way we can contribute to the growing online communities of creative coders, hackers and programmers to inspire new ideas and as a way of giving back to the collective process of open source innovation.

While our tools are the same as those working a robotic factory floor, programming office packages and movie effects, our process of software development is quite different. We have to accommodate a lot of factors when working with live performance art, and especially in contemporary dance. We often joke that every run is a tech run in Recoil. As programmers we have be to very good at continuously communicating where we are to make sure that we are ready for runs when the dancers are warm. If they wait too long they get cold and injuries abound.

The artistic aim behind working with integrating dance and technology on stage is one of balanced interdependency. We work with tracking technology and the intricacies of interactive software on stage because it enables us to create dynamic places and environments that depend on human presence. The dance should need the technology and vice versa to be interesting. When working in the studio some of our dancers have expressed that they felt someone was missing from rehearsals. Likewise the software depends on human presence to track and interpret.

We strive to balance the interactive frame and the human presence by making both elements interdependent - they have to need each other.