Interact with Us

FireBox will be spending next week at the UK Theatre School courtesy of the Dance House working on new material for an interactive dance performance. The exciting part is...

that as well as being able to watch the FireBox dancers performing, you will also be able to get involved and get interacting with the piece. Don't worry you don't need to dance if you don't want to, you just have to be willing to hold a light and move around the room. Easy.

Come along on Friday 20th June at 6pm for your chance to watch it, try it out or both!

UK Theatre School - opposite the old Odeon cinema
4 West Regent Street,
Glasgow
G2 1RW

The Practice Room, The Poles and The Paper

It's been a busy time for FireBox recently with a few breakthroughs in terms of my degree project, the first draft of my masters due in and working on a dance film with some contemporary/pole dancers.

Isadora is starting to behave herself in the Practice Room at The Arches just in time for my Dance House creative lab at the UK theatre school next week. I've got nice LED lights to use as a trigger and the dancers have been working on some great sequences that will be used as the basis for their improvisations. I'd asked them to choreograph their own combos as I'd wanted something different from my usual style and they ended up creating 4 different combos that are very much my style - perhaps we've all been working together too long!

I still need to get all my extra dancers together one weekend to film the movie clips for the piece and, as always, I'm expecting that to be a logistical nightmare.

Two of my dancers, Gill Smith and Suzi Kelly, have been going to pole dancing classes recently and were keen to combine it with contemporary dance so we got together and made a film with them showing off their new skills. The first edit is done and as soon as they've signed off on it I'll be punting it around different events and getting it shown.



Finally, the dreaded paper. The first draft is in and I'm waiting on some feedback before I get stuck in to completing it. There are some things I already know need to be expanded upon and clarified but the basis is there so I just need to get my head down and get on with it.

What Goes Up...

FireBox dancers and friends, Gillian and Suzi, have been going to pole dancing classes recently and have really got into the whole thing. As well as being the source of endless anecdotes about clammy palms and upside down spins they have also decided that pole dancing, combined with contemporary, would be a good subject for a dance film.

The idea came to them a while ago and they asked me to get involved in the filming/editing part of it which is scheduled for Monday (26th May). I plan to work with high end and low end cameras to create an interesting quality to the film which will reflect the perceived differences in the dance forms.

What you need is a Toggle!

After a tutorial with Dan and a brainstorming session with Gair on Thursday then hours locked in a room in The Arches I've had a breakthrough with Isadora.

It makes sense.

I get it.

I can't quite convey how happy that makes me and how much of a relief it is (I'm sure it's just as much of a relief to my tutors as well who must have been worried I'd change my mind again) to realise that I'll be able to pull off my ideas.

Isadora Is Trouble.

It was a bit of a disappointing day at the Arches today. I had 3 of the dancers I'll be using at my disposal and just felt like I was wasting their time as I couldn't figure out what I was doing with Isadora.

I want to be able to divide the space into a grid and activate video clips when someone enters a certain square of the grid. I can get the video to start but stopping it and switching to something else isn't happening at the moment.

We ended up doing class and going home early. I can't use the space next Friday so I have 2 weeks to figure out what I'm doing before I see the dancers again.

Mini Makeover

The FireBox website has had a mini makeover this weekend with slicker page views and online videos. I'm trying to monitor how quickly the videos are streaming on different browsers and connections so please let me know what you think of the waiting time. The videos will open up in a new page so feel free to browse through the rest of the site while you're waiting.

FireBox website

Dark Matter at Montage

I've just found out that Dark Matter will be screened at Montage Video Dance Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa this weekend. I applied to the festival a few weeks ago and had actually forgotten it was this weekend so it was quite a surprise to receive the email. The event, curated by Jeanette Ginslov and Gerard Bester of Walking Gusto Productions, was named a 'world beater' by Adrienne Sichel last year and will include a line up of dance videos that are exciting, innovative and astounding. I'm especially pleased to have Dark Matter selected as Katrina McPherson's Moment was shown last year as was Nascent by Gina Czarnecki.

You can view an excerpt from Dark Matter here and let me know what you think or if you have to be in Johannesburg this weekend pop in to the Wits Downstairs Theatre.

Dog Walker Cafe

I was approached by James at Jarprocess a few weeks ago to film a short dance piece for a dream sequence in his latest film, Dog Walker Cafe. Bitterly cold and wearing far too few layers we all met up in a car park in Clydebank to dance around by car headlight on Tuesday evening. Me plus 5 other FireBox dancers were involved in the shoot using material I choreographed specifically for this. The plan was to involve some still images of us working with lights but James felt it wasn't necessary and that he had enough without it. The benefit of this is that I can develop this more and work on it properly for a new piece.

FireBox Rehearsal

I had the dancers in the studio for a few hours today working on some new material for a film we've been asked to be involved in (more on that next time) but I took the opportunity to try out working with lights and slow shutter speed techniques. Considering the dancers were improvising and we were only using mobile phones for lights I think the results are quite promising...



The top 2 images were taken with an 8 second shutter and the bottom 2 were taken with 4 second shutters. Even just being in the studio catching glimpses of the movement and the dancers with the naked eye was interesting so I'm looking forward to developing this idea further and think, with choreographed movement and photography, the effects could be very interesting.

Online and On Time

After designing, re-designing and re-re-designing the new FireBox Dance Theatre website with my new found Dreamweaver skills it finally online today just making my self-imposed deadline of 'the end of January'. I work best when I have deadlines.

The design was inspired by the photo shoot we had at The Arches with Derrick (Linton) at the start of December as well as the new logo, which incidentally inspired the coloured stripes across our faces in the 'naked warpaint' shots, but I was having problems finding a colour for text that would work well on both the red and the grey part of the brick background. The solution was to add a plain panel that would contain all the text, with a few exceptions just for variation, but this seemed very sterile and precise against the background. So I searched around and found a black panel with a grunge border that gave the impression that the black strip had been painted onto the wall. With this in place, everything else seemed to work together and, personally, I feel the website is a real indication of the style of the company and our dancers.

Here it is, let me know what you think.