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night cloud

2018
Collaborative performance by Daniel E. Roberts and Sangjun Yoo
Premiered in Temporary Landscapes, Velocity Dance Center, Seattle, Washington, May 18–20, 2018

Choreography: Daniel E. Roberts
Projection and Spatial Design: Sangjun Yoo
Dancers: Biag Gaongen, Anthony Milian, Hannah Simmons, 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 is a collaborative performance that merges choreography and projected light to explore the shifting boundary between natural and artificial space. Four synchronized projectors and a haze machine turn a black-box theater into a cloud-like environment, where light becomes both material and atmosphere. Geometric projections cut planes of visibility through the haze, concealing and revealing the dancers as they move.

Light no longer works as stage illumination. It becomes a tactile, spatial presence that moves with the dancers’ gestures, and what the audience sees depends on where a body meets a plane of light at any given moment. Rather than a seamless theatrical illusion, the performance offers a field of rupture and transformation, in which visibility itself is continually made and unmade by light, haze, and the moving body.