LUCIA DANCES
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An Immersive Dance Theatre Project
1st tests on the Dome at the Armagh Planetarium
The project has now reached an advanced prototype and testing phase, with key learnings from practical experiments across multiple immersive environments and technologies. On the 20th October we had a private showing of Lucia Dances in the 360°a Dome at the Planetarium in Armagh. This gave us the opportunity to get valuable feedback from the invited audience and will allow for further work before we show the work again.
What we now need urgently to advance the project to full performance capability is an injection of substantial funding.
To date the project has been part funded by the Go Succeed programme and continues to be supported by the DfC and Future Screens NI.
The research process took us on an investigative journey of increased complexity and led us to new opportunities, resulting in a partnership with Dr Kerem Çubuk at Armagh Planetarium and and real-time manipulation of visual elements within a 360° dome. Having recording voiceovers at SRC Banbridge, more recently the spatial and sonic soundscapes for the project have been created by Dr. Isaac Gibson and Prof. Pedro Rebelo at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queens University.
Based on the life story of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, Light Theatre Company is developing an ambitious Immersive Dance Drama.
A promising dancer in 1920’s Paris was trained by Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond in what was known as ‘Rhythmic Dancing’, Lucia was beginning to be noticed by critics and the press and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, she stopped dancing and spent most of the rest of her life in therapy and institutions. Lucia’s father - the writer James Joyce - arranged consultatiosn with Carl Jung who diagnosed her as schizophrenic.
Initial Investigations
The project has progressed through significant development stages, including extensive investigation at CULTVR in Wales; hands-on testing in immersive Full Dome settings at the Market Place REAL IDEAS Dome in Plymouth, and Igloo Vision in London.
Early on we collaborated with Queens University Media Lab, where motion capture experiments showed promise and offer solutions for future development. We worked closely with dancer Maeve McGreevy both at the Media Lab and at Southern Regional College (SRC) in Banbridge and expanded the original script into an immersive dance performance and visual storyboard.
Lucia Dances at Bloomsday in Szombathaly, Hungary
Szombathely is a Beautiful small town in Hungary from which Virag - the father of Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, is supposed to have come. Every year the town hosts a Bloomsday festival and this year the Mayor of Szombathely invited Csilla and Alistair to join them in celebrating Bloomsday and to explore the possibility of bringing Lucia Dances to a future festival .