By day, Kelowna’s Rotary Centre for the Arts is a sanctuary for local artists, but when night falls the venue is transformed by a visual art installation.
“Living Things is a festival of devised performance of new works created by the artists performed by the artists,” said Neil Cadger, Living Things Festival artistic director.
This year’s festival is celebrating movement, objects and art. The month-long event has been scaled down for their fifth anniversary but their show-stopping take over of the R.C.A. is one that is hard to miss.
“We have this projection which is called The Collective Body which is created by 50 artists from across North America,” said Cadger.
“The dancers created one-minute videos of a body part and that was sent to musicians who created the sounds corresponding or inspired by the images they saw. Then those recordings were sent to other dancers who created videos and it went down the line like that.”
UBC Okanagan media studies student and video editor Chloe Chang took on the enormous task of putting The Collective Body together. Also involved in the project were Aleksandra Dulic and Miles Thorogood.
“When the artists sent in their video I removed the background and make all of them very unified,” said Chang.
“At the same time, I colour grade them so that their true skin tone can be shown.”
Those long, meticulous hours of colour correcting and stitching together the videos have brought the art installation to life at the R.C.A.
“The Collective Body for me is finding a way to go through COVID-19 with artists because a lot of dancers and musicians, they can’t perform right now, but with digital technology we can help them express their own movement,” said Chang,
Each night until Jan. 30 the RCA will be lit up from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. with The Collective Body. The Living Things festival is also 10 short animated films; Objects in Motion, Part 1 on Jan., 19 and Objects in Motion, Part 2 on Jan. 26.
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