2018
Collaborative Project by Sangjun Yoo and Daniel E Roberts
World Premiere of Night Cloud
‘Temporary Landscapes’ at Velocity Dance Center, Seattle WA in May 18-20th 2018
‘Night Cloud’
Choreographer: Daniel E Roberts
Design: Sangjun Yoo
Dancers: Biag Gaongen, Anthony Milian, Hannah Simmons, and Erin Yen
Music: A Crimson Grail, Part II by Rhys Chatham
Costumes: Carl Bronsdon, courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts Dance Department
‘Night Cloud’ searches for a connection to boundaries of natural and artificial spaces. Roberts and Yoo embrace the concept of artistic transcendence through collaboration, synthesized through performance.
Night Cloud is a collaborative new media performance that merges choreography and digital projection to explore the boundaries between natural and artificial space. Choreographer Daniel Roberts and artist Sangjun Yoo created a cloud-like environment inside a black-box theater, using four projectors and a haze machine to stage light as both material and atmosphere.
Geometric projections transformed the stage into shifting planes of visibility, concealing and revealing dancers’ movements in real time. Audiences were immersed not in technology as spectacle, but in the sensorial interplay of light, haze, and performance. Over time, light ceased to operate as stage lighting or representation, instead becoming a tactile, spatial presence that synchronized with the dancers’ choreography.
By refusing the seamless illusion of theater, Night Cloud emphasized rupture and transformation. The interplay of projection and movement offered a new perspective on dance-technology collaborations, staging performance as a site where media and the body co-create immersive and ephemeral landscapes.
