Ghost Factory
Ghost Factory is the latest in Bridgman|Packer Dance’s body of acclaimed and genre-breaking work that features their "Video Partnering" — the integration of live performance and video technology. Inspired by the residents and vast deserted factories of Johnson City, an upstate New York town, Ghost Factory is a compelling work that reveals remnants of a past era through a contemporary lens. Live performance merges with haunting video imagery of abandoned factory buildings, evoking the humanity these spaces once held.
Audio/Visual Exhibition: Places With Hidden Stories
In conjunction with the stage performance of Ghost Factory, Bridgman|Packer offers an accompanying audio/visual installation, Places With Hidden Stories, which can presented in the theater lobby. This installation further brings alive the stories of residents in Johnson City as well as those from each host community which are gathered through local interviews and workshops. The installation and the stage work reveal how architecture can hold a town’s human stories hidden within its walls.
The creation of Ghost Factory was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Dance Project Finalist Grant Award, and commissioning support from the American Dance Asylum. Bridgman|Packer Dance is a 2020 NDP Finalist Grant Award recipient. Support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address sustainability needs during COVID-19 and in support of Ghost Factory.
Table Bed Mirror
Table Bed Mirror navigates through an illogical and fantastical night of dreams. While galloping through constantly shifting realities, the work references the neuroscience of the dream process and contrasts dreams’ most ridiculously commonplace details with the expansive and outrageous. Live performance, video, text, and sound score create an absurdist collage that intends to confound the perception of reality and flip assumptions upside down.
Parts of Table Bed Mirror were developed during a Catalpa Artist Residency 2018, Desert Hot Springs, CA.
TRUCK
Truck is designed to be performed inside a 17-foot box truck, bringing performance to nontraditional and unexpected locations.
Through Bridgman|Packer’s signature integration of live performance and video technology, an ordinary box truck evolves from the utilitarian into a reimagined space, a micro-world of visions and transformation. Exploring how context changes perception, the work ranges from evocative to humorous, to sensuous, to wacky.
With the audience looking into the bed of the truck, the work can be performed in parking lots, parks, loading docks, field houses, plazas or street corners. Truck can be presented in conjunction with stage presentations or as a separate event.
Truck can be performed outdoors after dark in parking lots, parks, college campuses, and street corners or at any hour in indoor parking garages or large indoor spaces.
Parts of Truck were created through a Fellowship with Experimental Film Virginia 2014. Truck has received a New England Foundation for the Arts Expeditions Grant to tour the work to seven sites in New England in 2015-16.
Remembering What Never Happened
The intersection of memory and imagination is at the core of Remembering What Never Happened. In this expansion of their signature integration of live performance and video technology, memory becomes a constantly shifting territory as they delve into the changeable nature of time, form, perception, and identity. Bridgman and Packer interact with video projections of their images that morph and explode into digital re-interpretations of the human body, while scenes shot on location in the Mojave Desert transform into surreal landscapes.
In a departure from their past work, this piece incorporates simultaneous computer video processing, with time-delay and image-altering capabilities. Multiple video images appear and evaporate in response to the performers’ movements and evolve from photo realism to strokes of abstraction. The work rides the line between the constant and the shifting, the tangible and the subconscious, while exploring the plasticity of memory and experience.
Remembering What Never Happened is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund/Forth Fund Project co-commissioned by The Yard (Chilmark, MA) in partnership with Opera House Arts (Stonington, ME), and Silvermine Arts Center (New Canaan, CT) and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). The Forth Fund is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The creation of this work is also made possible in part by a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Grant.
Parts of Remembering What Never Happened were developed during The Yard's 2015 Offshore Creation Residency and a Catalpa Artist Residency 2015, Desert Hot Springs, CA.
Voyeur
Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer received a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Award (The Bessies) for Voyeur at The Sheen Center.
Voyeur pushes Bridgman|Packer’s exploration of the live and virtual into new territory choreographically, thematically, and technologically. With the paintings of Edward Hopper as a point of departure, this work bears witness to fragmented moments of private lives. In a departure from their past repertory, Voyeur is designed for performance in museums, galleries and alternative spaces, as well as for traditional theaters. It incorporates a multi-surfaced set made of hinged panels at various angles. Through the use of video projections, the set transforms, evoking imagery of both spatial and psychological enclosures as the performers are seen through the windows and doorway.
The use of live cameras on stage creates multiple perspectives as the performers merge and collide with the video imagery. Stream-of-consciousness sequences evoke the light, time and place of Hopper’s work. The creative team includes filmmaker Peter Bobrow, sound designers Scott Lehrer and Leon Rothenberg, and lighting designer Frank DenDanto III.
The work can also include an installation component where, prior to the performance, the audience is invited to enter the set to explore the projections and live cameras.
“With Voyeur they unpack and, more than that, press the aesthetic and dramatic power of Hopper’s work...The rhythmic flickers of the choreography, lighting, video, and audio prove mesmerizing...Voyeur assumes a life of its own.”
"Breathtaking brilliance...one is left spellbound with the feeling of having walked into a dream."
Voyeur is co-commissioned by Portland Ovations (Portland, ME) and the Edward Hopper House Art Center (Nyack, NY). The creation of Voyeur is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Double Expose
Double Expose is an exploration of identity, relationship, and the human psyche. With a nod to classical cinema as a form of contemporary mythology, Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, along with a multitude of their video counterparts, embody a range of archetypal personae. Blending live camera, animation, and pre-recorded video of urban settings, Bridgman and Packer create multi-layered perspectives and surreal mindscapes amid an alchemy of the live and the virtual.
Double Expose is a development of Bridgman|Packer's concepts of "Video Partnering" and "Technological Cubism". Double Expose includes original live music by composer Ken Field, video by Peter Bobrow, animation by Karen Aqua, and lighting design by Frank DenDanto III. It is 40 minutes in length and is paired with Under The Skin, making a performance of 70 minutes plus intermission.
Double Expose is made possible in part with funding from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and residency support from Ordway Center for the Performing Arts (St. Paul, MN) and Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC). Double Expose is a co-commissioning project of Out/North (Anchorage, AK) in partnership with Dance Umbrella (Austin, TX) and the National Performance Network Creation Fund. The NPN Creation Fund is sponsored by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, Altria, and the National Endowment for the Arts. One section of Double Expose was originally commissioned by Duo Multicultural Center, NYC.
Under the Skin
In Under The Skin, the duet form explodes into a magically populated stage as Bridgman and Packer interchange with their ever-multiplying virtual selves. The performers' bodies and costumes become projection screens, creating a morphing and redefinition of identities and revealing psychological depths. The original score of layered saxophones and driving rhythms was created by composer/saxophonist Ken Field.
Under The Skin is a co-commissioning project by Contemporary Dance Theater of Cincinnati in partnership with The Dance Place of Washington, D.C. and the National Performance Network Creation Fund. The NPN Creation Fund is sponsored by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, Altria, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The creation of Under The Skin was supported by funds from the 92nd Street Y New Works in Dance Fund.