noragarda@gmail.comiowadancefest@gmail.com In July 2008 Nora Garda and Mark McCusker, key participants (see bios), will spend 2 weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina to create videodances with several argentine dancers, 2 video cameras (1 blu-ray, 1 minidv), and Iowa choreographies. Garda and McCusker plan a creative challenge that produces artistic growth for themselves and provocative visual innovation for eager audiences in Iowa. In this new project Camera Dance, they’ll be both in front and behind the cameras as dancers and video artists. They have identified-committed project partners: contacts and dancers in Buenos Aires - and in Iowa consultants, collaborators and presenters (Tango Clubs of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, UIHC Project Art). They are rehearsed and ready. Upon return to Iowa, after the grant period, the footage will be edited by Garda and McCusker with collaborators Deanne Wortman & Mark NueCollins (see bios). The videodances will be presented online at CameraDance.Org, at live events for Iowa Tango groups and as installation at Project Art at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics (UIHC).
Thus, the project's goal is to have qualified Iowa artists create videodance and documentation in the streets and milongas* of Buenos Aires. The success of the project is the creation of this footage as primary source material.
Camera Dance will be experimental and investigative. In Buenos Aires, Garda and McCusker will share duties as "subjective" videodance and "objective" documentary camera operators. The documentary cam can be described as eye-level, straight-on, even-keeled, whole-body long-establishing-safety shots. The shooting style for the videodance cam will be variety of zooms, close-ups, swish pans, tilts, pedestals, rolls, extreme angles, blurs, etc. Garda and McCusker will not be using digital effects while shooting (solarization, pixilation, etc.) except where low lighting requires low lux settings. Editors can add effects they deem aesthetically desirable during post-production after the funded grant period. The dances from Argentina will be Tango and Folkloric. The Iowa choreographies are fusions of forms Garda and McCusker are trained in: Tango, modern, contact improv, and more. Why Argentina? Why Tango? Garda is an argentine native who'll return there with her Iowa-made dances. She has danced in many Midwestern milongas and believes that knowledge from the Rio de le Plata where Tango coalesced would benefit the growing dance constituency of Iowa. McCusker, a native Iowan, began his tango studies in Waterloo in 1977. In 2004 he created a performance about how tango traveled around the globe and in 2006 performed part of it in Spain. Creating new work in Argentina will be an artistic challenge McCusker has been training for. Garda’s desire for new video experience drives her to Camera Dance.
* Social tango party
