Into the WIRE is a dance performance dealing with themes of social isolation in a technological dystopia. The show—being presented by local non-profit dance studio Broken Rhythms—has been over a year in the making, but due to COVID-19 the studio, fittingly, has had to adapt it for a digital medium. Into the WIRE artistic director Dyana Sonik-Henderson says she realized the virus might affect the performance the day they started printing posters to promote it.
“So, I had to mourn the loss of that show and that creation, and also try to tell all the people that worked for the show that the live work was cancelled,” says Sonik-Henderson. “And then we kind of had to give birth to a different show.”
Instead of a cast of seven performing live in a theatre, Into the WIRE will now be performed live on Facebook entirely by Sonik-Henderson from her condo. She says that the hardest part about the whole experience was telling her cast they wouldn’t be performing.
“Each dancer had their own character arcs, but in this new creation I’m kind of having to develop each character into its own piece,” she says. “So I’m playing almost each symptom of what this social isolation has brought to me.”
It isn’t only the cast that’s been cut back. The show features entirely original music created by musician Dan Godlovich. Of the 10 songs Godlovich wrote for the performance, only three will be included in the online version.
“I got really interested in this idea of living in this time where we’re doing so much damage to the natural world and gradually replacing it with artificial simulations of it, you know, virtual worlds and so on. And I wanted to explore that through the score,” says Godlovich. “I started writing all these pieces with acoustic instruments and human voice. And so, I wrote all these pieces and then started pulling them apart, making revisions. I would pull them apart and gradually replace all of these natural acoustic real things with digital simulacra of them. I wound up with a score where it’s all these digital emulations of very natural sounds. They sound real enough that you know what they’re supposed to be, but there’s always this uncanny valley where it’s not quite real. So that was my inspiration for the score. As we destroy the natural world, we replace it with something that is this imitation.”
All the artists who were not able to perform will still be receiving payment for their work, but that doesn’t take away from their disappointment over the live performance being cancelled. Even so, Sonik-Henderson is satisfied with the final product and is excited to see what kind of reactions the show will bring.
“I like that it kinda worked out for this show, because I think it works in this medium versus some of the other shows [that] would not,” she says. “And I’m proud of all of us at Broken Rhythms that were able to be like, okay, new plan, lets do it.”
Into the WIRE
8pm Friday, April 17
Free, but donations accepted
brokenrhythmsvictoria.com/into-the-wire-online