AURA

Dark Olive was brought in to production manage and work out the technical delivery of AURA, a new outdoor dance piece by Southpaw Company, commissioned by Worcester's DanceFest for Light Night Worcester in February 2024.

AURA by Southpaw Company and DanceFest Wednesday 14 - Thursday 15 February 2024 | Cornmarket, Worcester

Southpaw's Artistic Director Robby Graham had a concept and, with it, a serious technical challenge. AURA asks what a person's energy would look like if you could see it - the piece is built on the heart's magnetic field and the unseen connections between people - and it needed those connections drawn on the ground, live, as the dancers moved through them.

Graham's starting point was a piece of research. In 2017 a UCL study wired up a West End audience and found their heart rates drifting into synchrony over the course of the show, rising and falling together with the piece they were watching. A room full of strangers, physically in time with one another and not one of them aware of it. AURA takes that and puts it on the floor where you can see it.

What that took was a projector rigged overhead pointing straight down, motion sensors reading the ground beneath it, and preconfigured algorithmic patterns mapped onto the floor in response to whoever moved across it. The image was not played back at the dancers. It was made by them.

That is one thing in a theatre and quite another on a public square. The shape of the problem came out of a first video call with Graham. AURA is an evening piece; the rig had to be able to work up to ten metres, with no way of fixing the final height in advance, because the projection could only be sized against the square once we were standing in it; and the Cornmarket had to be open and clear as a working city centre every morning. So whatever went up had to come down safely at the end of each night and go back up the next day for the following show - in February, with sensitive equipment, a small budget, and the public walking underneath it.

The answer was to hang the projector from the cradle of a cherry picker. Up at height each evening, down and driven off at the end of the night, nothing left standing in the square in between - and, just as usefully, adjustable. A tower has to be built to a height decided weeks earlier. A boom can be flown to whatever height the picture turns out to need, and moved again on the night. We drew the rig up as CAD sketches so it could be understood and signed off by the festival team, who held the event documentation and risk assessment for every piece on the programme, and built the mount from scratch. Operating the machine needed a licence we did not hold, so we obtained the IPAF PAL card - for this, and for whatever needs height next.

The piece ran twelve minutes, twice a night on the Cornmarket, danced by Southpaw's company dancers alongside twenty-five local, community and professional dancers from Worcester. For twenty minutes after each performance the floor was handed over to the audience, who could walk into the projection and set it moving themselves.

Responsive projection visuals were designed by Paul Trickett. AURA was supported by Dance Hub Birmingham and the Bransford Trust. Both DanceFest and Southpaw Company are Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisations, and Light Night Worcester is produced by Severn Arts.