Maelstrom is a multi-channel, immersive 3D-animated experience that integrates sound with the choreography of digital humans.
Created by digital choreographer Harrison Hall and motion graphics artist Luca Dante, Maelstrom is a sombre meditation on the unseen, hidden and destabilising forces that transform us.
Combining the motion capture of dancing bodies, 3D animation and physics engines with sound by experimental techno/ambient sound artist Pavel Milyakov (Russia), the work is experienced as a multi-channel projection and soundscape.
Hall undertook an expansive movement study in 2020 examining the impulses of the physical body under destabilising situations, feeding his body’s movements into the virtual plane. He extended this practice with 10 unique movers (dancers/martial artists) culminating in this final realisation of the project.
In Maelstrom, the vastness of time and space sets the scene for an unsettling dance of nameless skins. The uncanny movements of these digital embodiments forewarn us of the fragility of reality, as bodies fly and swirl in an absurd dance that warps earthly limits. Neither here nor there, this dance exists in the volume between worlds, through pressures and forces to no particular place.
Maelstrom drags us like rag dolls from the present, flinging our flailing limbs onto the threshold of tomorrow. Into the vortex, we go down, further and deeper, we go down…
