KINODANCE COMPANY An interdisciplinary artist collective making stage performances, installations and film
Kinodance Company is an artist collaborative founded in Boston in 1999 by choreographer/dancer Alissa Cardone, filmmaker Alla Kovgan and visual artist Dedalus Wainwright out of passion for the kinetic arts, experimentation and a strong belief in the power of interdisciplinary collaborations. Since 2004, core members include choreographer/dancer Ingrid Schatz and lighting designer Kathy Couch. Among Kinodance’s creations are intermedia and expanded cinema stage performances, installations and films. Choreography of elements is the term that Kinodance invented to formally describe their art making process. In Kinodance performances, each element (dance, cinema, set, sound) is a strong, fully developed score that compliments the others — sometimes soloing, sometimes partnering, sometimes driving a tight ensemble. The outcome is multi-sensory, immersive experiences that rejuvenate the eye and perception. DeAnna has been dancing as a soloist with Kinodance since 2006. She has had the pleasure of collaborating, teaching, performing and touring with Ingrid Schatz and Alissa Cardone since 1999.
Kinodance selected one of Dance Magazine's "25 to watch" in 2008...CLICK HERE
"FUSE"
choreography: alissa cardone & ingrid schatz performance: kaitlin morse, deanna pellecchia, christina robson & ingrid schatz film: alla kovgan set design: dedalus wainwright music/composition: performed live by roger miller lighting design: kathy couch costume design: laura coulter
Light, alive in its many forms, the Film Frame, the Lumia Box, Silent Cinema with live accompaniment, and the film "Blade Runner” are the inspirations for "FUSE”.
In the 1920s and 30s, Thomas Wilfred, a Dutch-born American artist sought to define light as an artform, coining the term "Lumiaî to describe this new medium. Wilfred developed a self-contained mechanical device with a screen like a television set called the "Claviluxî to perform Lumia. This apparatus could play colorful and dynamic abstract light shows for days or months without repeating. Devising compositions for his "lumia boxesî, Wilfred was able to choreograph color, volume, shape and movement trajectories of luminescent strokes to mesmerize viewers with elegant and vivid dances of light. After World War II, Wilfred found a new passion as an early pioneer of projection in theater. We were inspired to adapt Wilfredís ideas to an intermedia performance and have created our own lumia-box for the stage, envisioning it as a film frame or an oversized TV set.
We used Ridley Scottís 1982 film "Blade Runner", based on the cult novel by Phillip K. Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" to structure FUSE. "Blade Runnerî is a masterpiece of spectacular set & lighting design and its intriguing cast of characters provided us the raw materials to choreograph a drama in tune with a constantly evolving score of light and sound.
DeAnna Pellecchia in "Amazonian glitter...cavorts, hangs, flips, gyrates inside or outside a giant box encased in taut gauze on which and through light splinters into confetti, explodes into wide green bands or windows, erupts in pink bubbles or ribbons of fire." Kinodance's "clanging multi-sensory collaborations... jangle like a sock to the jaw" and have "the power to rock a bit of your world". -Thea Singer, THE BOSTON GLOBE
"Mysterious figures (the choreographers and Stephanie Lanckton and DeAnna Pellecchia) glimmered and went invisible in a 12-foot room with a scrim for a front wall...suspended on its roof, hanging from the ceiling and clambering up one perforated wall...the movement suggested dramatic encounters. Characters seemed to stalk other characters, capture them, partner them in shadow duets. A woman ricocheted off the walls;I thought of Lillian Gish trapped in a closet in Broken Blossoms." -Marcia Siegel, THE BOSTON PHOENIX
"Before the artistic collaboration of Kinodance, who knew dance, film, and the arts could be blended in such a way that the original boundaries between each medium ultimately seem to have never existed at all. In their mission to fuse the various arts, Kinodance succeeds." - BIG, RED & SHINY
"At times the dancers look imprisoned; at other times they're empowered, as they effortlessly swing up, catch hold of the ceiling, flip upside down, and hang like bats. It all adds to a state of beautiful unreality...elements have been so carefully blended that what happens is mesmeric." -THE BOSTON GLOBE "The dancer (DeAnna Pellecchia), clad in a dominatrix-esque silver and black outfit out of a grade B space movie, clung to the walls, the ceiling, anywhere she could possibly make an escape as her aggressors moved closer and closer. The sexual tension they created moved in waves off the stage and continued even after the attacked dancer left the box." -Chelsey Philpot, BIG RED & SHINY
"DENIZEN"
choreography/performance: alissa cardone & ingrid schatz performance: (dancers) halee beucler, alison manning, kaitlin morse, deanna pellecchia, & christina robson (soprano vocalist) Noune Karapetian film: alla kovgan set design: dedalus wainwright lighting design: kathy couch costume design: laura coulter
Described as "Geo-psychic" by the Boston Herald's critic Ted Bale, Denizen is an expanded cinema performance inspired by the masterworks of the great Armenian filmmakers Sergey Parajanov and Artavazd Peleshian. Denizen is our artistic response to their films ñ our way to engage in an imaginary conversation with these filmmakers about the stories they tell, the places they portray, the rituals their characters embody as well as the creative principles they used to make their films.
The performance is structured as a cycle of poetic haikus with each scene evoking familiar life experiences such as celebration, marriage, traveling, war, birth & death. The performers embody both terrestrial and ethereal beings in transmitting the mundane, the mythical and the ritual aspects of a land and its people.
In Denizen, the myth of Anahit (one of the most favorite goddesses of Armenia, the Mother of Wisdom, the Goddess of Fertility and the Warrior Goddess) is conjured to symbolize the ancient concept of the trinity and the possibility to conceive of all beings as fundamentally linked, distinct yet equal. Anahit is performed by soprano vocalist Nouné Karapetian, whose songs about women, work, shepherds, sorrow and celebration are woven into a lush fabric of dance, image, light, sound and environment.
"A breathtaking synthesis of live and filmed dance." - The Boston Globe
“The layering of emotionally potent choreography, exotic imagery, sounds, and staging add up to a daring and dramatically theatrical experience.” – The Boston Globe
“Denizen is lush and sensual, mysterious and vivid, formally sophisticated and painterly…” - Ted Bale of the Boston Herald
“…Idiosyncratic half-folk, half-alien…transforming the potentially alienating language of postmodern dance into a hauntingly familiar experience…” – The Weekly Dig
January through March, 2010, Kinodance toured throughout New England performing both FUSE and DENIZEN at venues including Connecticut College and Keene State College. These excerpts were filmed during performances on that tour.
FIRE DUET----------------------> WITH SOPRANO NOUNE KARAPETIAN DANCERS: HALEE BEUCLER & DEANNA PELLECCHIA
