LISTEN TO NATURE
Two dancers entangled—conversation to conflict to dissolution. / A hand-drawn animated film for which all the frames were drawn simultaneously by 100 people over the course of a 30-minute performance.
A MFA thesis project created within CalArts, Californian Institute of the Arts, wich offers a variety of unique and engaged programs where art meet activism.
"Listen To Nature," a project to reconnect people with nature at a time when our planet's biodiversity is facing enormous threats.
The artist, with this work, wants to inspire people to a deeper appreciation of nature, both for the good of the planet and for individual well-being. And to do this, Francesco, wanted to enhance this message by using new emerging digital techniques such as generative art and creative coding.
CREDITS
Direction, writing & production: Francesco Miesco
Dancers & choreographer: Francesco Miesco
Creation August, 2022
4mn27
BIOGRAPHY
FRANCESCO MISCEO is an experimental contemporary dancer and new media artist born in Modena, Italy, in 1997. He works in the field of digital and performing arts, creating many forms of art, from stage shows to exhibitions combining real and virtual worlds.
Francesco places the human body at the heart of artistic and technological challenges and adapts current technological tools to create a timeless poetry through a visual language, based on play and pleasure, which feeds the imagination. His work is recognized for its great holistic methodology fueled by a strong digital background. He considers not only physical elements such as dance, but also optics, sound and sensory and, above all, the spacio-temporal component as an integral part of his choreographic writing.
BIOGRAPHIES
Yolanda Tianyi-Shao (韶天怡) is a choreographer who seeks unexpected collaborations, particularly with animators, filmmakers, and experimental sound artists. After a decade of training in Chinese classical dance, Shao began to lose interest in the rigid pursuit of specific movements deemed beautiful or correct. Her current work as a choreographer deals with the extremes of human communication, touching on desire, satisfaction, and emptiness. Her choreography strikes a balance between established patterns and improvisation, making onstage, movement-based dialogue—and trust—essential components of each performance.
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Aaron Holmes is an animator and playwright based in Los Angeles. In animation, theater, and in playful combinations of the two disciplines, Aaron strives for the experiential, the spectacular, and that which foregrounds its own artifice in order to, perhaps, overcome it and achieve human connection. His replacement animation practice relies heavily on “readymade” animations—sequences in which individual frames represent unique found objects gathered from the world. The resulting photos depict things as they exist, as opposed to photos of things that have been manifested or manipulated by the hands. In this way, Holmes undermines his own claims to authorship by accepting unplanned elements in nearly every frame. Experientially, his work confronts with velocity, challenges viewers to search for a signal in the noise, and generates alternating states of anxiety and transcendence.