Time Track Productions has begun work on their new evening length work entitled "ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS AIR". Inspired by the age of modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the first attempts to project light in the form of a moving image, the piece looks at the illusory nature of these images and how they have changed and influenced our perception over the last hundred years. The company creates an environment that is both magical and fragile, that illuminates fractured moments and unites visual and kinetic forces. Combining animation and video, dance, an original score and fragmented narrative, ‘ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR’ examines the effect of powerful imagery as it connects us to rarely explored places in reality and within ourselves.

The project will premiere on September 26th –28th as a part of the Women of Substance series at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium on the College of St. Catherine campus. The piece includes a cast of ten core performers and an additional 20 “extras”, animation, video, original music and movement. The work examines the effect of moving images on the experience of twentieth century mankind. Through the dreams of an inventor of motion pictures near the end of the nineteenth century, we share in his visions of the implications of “turning animate beings into projections of light”.

The origins of this piece began over two years ago, during the creation of the evening-length work “Light & Dark” in March 2000. It was a piece of many “firsts” for us, the most important being the linking of visual projections/animation to movement and to the narrative of the piece. The essence of this question became “how can an image, used in conjunction with movement and stage action enhance communication of the idea and intent of the work?”
The images we use are in motion and kinetically linked to the movement. As we began exploring the ideas about this merging, we also found the need to examine its relevance to an audience. Simply putting movement and visuals together as separate abstract forms is territory that has already been mined. As observers of human nature and societal trends, we wanted to explore universal questions. How did the image as a virtual facsimile or shadow of truth gain so much power in our society now? In our current society, images of everything are everywhere. Images have become more prevalent and changed in dynamics as developments in technology continue to push them forward. What power does an image have in our lives?

Historically, images have been used in theater as backdrops to create environments that set the time and place of a particular scene. Man has always been recreating an image to tell a story, for self-expression or to gain perspective on larger questions. The history of dance follows a similar route. Movement was used as an ancient form of communication and as a shared experience or ritual. From the drawing on cave walls through the religious paintings of the middle ages, we have tried to recapture experience so that we may see it reflected back to us (the power of the shadow). Movement happens in a moment and is gone; it can never be recreated exactly the same way twice. Recreating an experience through an image creates an illusory solidity that allows us to capture one fleeting moment in time. The ephemerality of the moment is grasped in an instance.

The numerous inventions of the nineteenth century that drove the culture in the direction of our current societal condition are mind-boggling. The invention of the railroad allowed us to travel at a greater speed and thus, in a sense, collapse time. As our collective concept of time and the world around us continued to expand, we were able to see images from places we had never been. The development of the first daguerreotype showed us a world that painting could not; the realistic portrayal of an image could not be denied. The piece begins with the first daguerreotype, a man standing motionless at a shoeshine block on a seemingly empty street in Paris. There is, of course, motion all around him, and this motion becomes the inspiration for our main character, an inventor, to try to capture this motion in the form of a projected image. The progression and changes brought forth by the development of photography and film are at the core of the piece. The characters in the piece are caught up in a whirlwind of growing modernity. The world was changing at a rate of speed not experienced at any time before, and those living in that time found themselves wondering where it would lead.

Our piece attempts to draw parallels between that age and the current one, as one looks at an old photograph of a grandparent and sees the shadows of their own face etched across time.
It is a Faustian bargain, one that Mary Shelly similarly voiced during that time, to create what we dream, to turn our solid experience into ethereal commodity. To take the world around us and convert it to light, to watch and experience as though it were real.
To watch, as Karl Marx put it, as “all that is solid, melts into air.”