Ballet Pixelle
| Ballet Pixelle | |
|---|---|
 |
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| General information | |
| Name | Ballet Pixelle |
| Previous names | Second Life Ballet |
| Year founded | 2006 |
| Founders | Inarra Saarinen |
| Principal venue | Ballet Pixelle Theatre Second Life, Quat |
| Website | www |
| Artistic staff | |
| Artistic Director | Inarra Saarinen |
| Ballet Mistress | Amelie Dibou |
| Music Director | Sora Izumikawa |
| Resident Choreographers | Inarra Saarinen |
Ballet Pixelle (previously known as Second Life Ballet) is a ballet company founded in 2006 by choreographer Inarra Saarinen. Saarinen still serves as artistic director and choreographer. Ballet Pixelle is the first company to perform completely in virtual reality. Its goal is to explore and extend physical and virtual dance and movement and to blend those realities.
The company presents neoclassical, contemporary ballet, and eclectic works with all original animations, choreography, and musical scores. The works are presented in real time with virtual dancers from all over the world. The dancers (from such places as Canada, Estonia, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and the USA) log in at the same time and, using avatars, perform choreography rehearsed previously. They are not automated, but actually dance in real time with the other dancers and the music. Mixed media arts are also used including historical video footage, photographs, machinima, paintings, and text. Anyone can watch the performances simply by accessing the Internet and logging into the global virtual reality called Second Life. There are no ticket fees.
Ballet Pixelle was founded in 2006 by Inarra Saarinen.
The original goal was to move the art of dance into a virtual environment, a mission which still continues. Inarra Saarinen has said “Our goal is to explore physical and virtual dance and movement and blended realities.” There was, early on, an emphasis on the avatars, or virtual representations of dancers, being controlled by real people, rather than being moved by pre-arranged programming or artificial synchronizing devices of any kind.
Some of the differences between virtual dance and physical possibility were obvious from the start: in the first production, Olmannen (2007), dancers flew, morphed into non-human shapes, and performed other feats impossible in the physical world. At first, the productions more closely resembled physical dance than later, as the artists explored the possibilities and limitations of the virtual format. For instance, there are no restrictions on the height or duration of leaps, physical body joint limits, the number of turns, or gravity such as hovering or flying. The restrictions which can occur are usually due to "lag" or latency -- timing difficulties stemming from the host computer interacting with the viewers' computers. But in Phylogeny (2009), which examined the reverse development of the species from humans to dragons, the lag was actually utilized in the choreography to allow differences in every performance where exciting interactions between the dancers could happen.
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