"It's definitely risky. All that cutting-edge stuff makes it more exciting," Beth Miklavcic said shortly before a performance this past weekend. But "If we're taking all this time to make artistic works, why not learn as we go?"
Except for a miniature spy camera that died the day before performances began Friday, the company had few problems this year, the fourth time it's done "InterPlay."
During the production, artists in various media, including dance, performance art, music and vocals, perform at five different sites across the country. All are captured in real-time video and broadcast simultaneously onto three screens in a small auditorium at the University of Utah. Eventually, Jimmy Miklavcic mixes the images together in the center screen.
This year, percussionists, cellists and violinists played while dancers moved in various rooms. Utah artist Adam Bateman, whose three-dimensional work usually deals with the printed word, made a paragraph out of letter-shaped pasta. "It's all about language in some way, so they thought my work was fitting. We think that when we write something down, it's going to be permanent, but that's not true," Bateman said.
Beth Miklavcic built a Zen garden with, among other materials, powdered drink mix, while a little girl unrolled white string around her. The string symbolizes technology and the Internet, which started simply like a Zen garden but is now overflowing with material, she said.
The performers' work is loosely tied together; they rehearse via video for weeks before the show, which involves 33 artists and 20 technicians. Most of them are students or work at the universities that served as sites for the video feed: the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Purdue University; the University of Maryland and Boston University. "That's one of the downfalls. Many of these people we've been working with for years, and I haven't met them in person," said Jimmy Miklavcic.
Even though it's hard to define the art form, "The global aspect of it is incredibly appealing - to think that all these people are doing the same thing together is amazing," said Anne Cullimore Decker, who came to see the closing show Sunday.
Beth Miklavcic was a modern dancer before she retired in 1995; though her body wasn't up to professional dancing, she wasn't ready to give up being an artist. At the same time, her husband was working in the computing field, using the kind of advanced mathematics Beth had been discouraged from studying as a girl.
They hatched an idea to combine their fields of knowledge, and Another Language was born. But it took five years to get the technology, then in its infancy, to do what they wanted. Every year, they're able to push the technology - essentially the same that allows people to talk to each other in videoconferencing - a bit further. The pieces use so much technology and bandwidth that it would be impossible to do them outside of universities.
"I've been performing for over 30 years now, and for me, it's the most exciting thing I could possibly do - because it's the most complicated thing I could possibly do," Beth Miklavcic said. "Now, choreography is easy compared to putting together a piece for 'Interplay.' "
Audiences are still small, but they are growing, they say, especially the number of people who watch the performances on live Internet streams. "You guys are very brave in coming out and trying something new, so thank you for your courage," Jimmy Miklavcic told the audience at Sunday's show.
