Clara Superfine in The Same Space
Still from The Same Space (Clara Superfine)

Online première | 'The Same Space' by Peter Leung

6 October 2020

The Same Space, the latest dance film project by Peter Leung, young creative associate of Dutch National Ballet, will premiere on 6 October at 19:30 hrs. The Same Space is part of the Virtual Residences of de Nederlandse Dansdagen.

Peter Leung directed the dance film, made with five dancers of the Dutch National Ballet, as an interactive experience. The performance was filmed simultaneously with three cameras in which the viewer can move from one camera perspective to another, creating an interaction with the space and the dancers.

The Same Space will premiere on Tuesday 6 October at 19.30 and can be seen via:

Dutch Dance Days | Virtual Residency Peter Leung

Immediately after the premiere there will be an online conversation with Peter Leung about his project. After the online premiere until 8 October 2020, The Same Space can be seen exclusively on the website of the Nederlandse Dansdagen.

After 8 October, the production can be viewed for another two months on Dutch National Ballet's online platform:

Peter Leung: "Having made ‘Gently Quiet’, a series of short dance film portraits at the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted to take the opportunity to research what it means to make a dance film performance. How can I keep an audience invested and interested over a period of more than a few minutes? How does an audience experience a dance work online in a way that feels live? With this project I hope to find out more about these questions and that we, as a dance sector can keep growing artistically in the digital realm, that it doesn’t feel like a substitute for the stage."

The Same Spacean interactive experience
Peter Leung directed the dance-film work as an interactive experience. The piece was created over the last few weeks with five dancers from Dutch National Ballet who were filmed with three cameras. As in a real performance there is only one take. The platform that the audience can watch the performance from, developed by Daan Nolen (Sense Studio) offers the viewer the choice to edit their own experience live during the performance itself, as they can move from one camera perspective to another, allowing them to interact with the space.

With the dancers and composer, Leung has been exploring themes such as choice, freedom, chance and perspective. The music for the performance film is created by Bertus Pelser and consists of the dancers recorded voices and the sounds that they made during the filming. The idea was to bring their voices to the surface rather than setting the work to an existing score. In this way everything has been made for this experience. The dancers used timecodes on the monitors as references, as they were filmed in silence, so the sounds that they made could be record to use in the final soundscape. Leung manipulated the timecodes, as a reference to objective time, for example five seconds can feel more like thirty seconds, especially during this period and people’s experiences with lockdown.
 

Photo Still uit The Same Space
Dancer Clara Superfine