Threads & Trajectories is a dance/media project directed by John Crawford, in association with choreographic supervisor Lisa Naugle and composer Alan Terricciano.

In Threads & Trajectories, layers of projected visual imagery are combined with music and dance to create a series of dance films representing a journey through an imaginary urban landscape. Moving images and sound are presented as a cycle of digital media fragments interwoven with live performance. The global urban experience is portrayed as an embodiment of collective memory, a repository for narrative structures that continually evolve through our physical responses to the circumstances we inhabit.

The Threads & Trajectories dance film series features choreography shot on location using digital video in the streets and hutongs of Beijing. Additional footage will include digital video source material gathered during journeys to Prague, Paris, New York and other locations. Digital animation and post-production work is being done at UC Irvine, using the facilities of the Embodied Media + Performance Technology Lab. The editing process is using video animation to create an abstract, painterly look, highlighting relationships between dancers and their surroundings. The final product will be mastered in high definition digital video.

The narrative structure of the Threads & Trajectories dance film series is based on the tales told by the explorer Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. This book re-imagines a journey taken by Marco Polo to the court of the Emperor of China, Kublai Khan, in the ancient city of Khanbaliq (now called Beijing). There Kublai Khan listens to Marco Polo’s fantastical descriptions of the many cities he claims to have visited on his journey. Each city is poetically described in imagery that references a wide range of human desires, fears, aspirations and delusions. We start to realize that perhaps each of the 55 cities described by Calvino is actually a different aspect of the same city. And perhaps this singular city is not an external landscape at all, but rather a translation of human perception and experience into an architectural framework, a spatial mapping of movement over time.

In Threads & Trajectories, this tale of the traveler is re-envisioned as a dance/media fabric linking local and global sensibilities between California and Beijing. The Invisible Cities text, conjuring global human truths through the perspectives of two individuals in a particular place and time, serves as an inspiration and springboard. Threads & Trajectories will not be a literal re-telling of Calvino’s story. Rather, using the text as a point of departure, our dance films will be abstract, imagistic, embodied responses to the space and time in which each of us finds ourselves.