Husband and wife team Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer of New York based Bridgman/Packer Dance have been performing and choreographing together for over thirty years. Since 2003, they've incorporated video images of themselves into their duet performances as a way to explore identity, reality and perception.

They'll be performing both Under the Skin and their latest piece, Double Expose, a co-commission with Austin's own Dance Umbrella, at the Long Center April 11-12. CultureMap Austin talked to them about their creative process, the concept of “video partnering,” and the importance of cinema in today's world.

---

How do you incorporate video images in your dance pieces?

Myrna Packer: We've come up with a term called "video partnering," where the video and the live performance have equal presence onstage.

Art Bridgman: Or there's a back and forth [between the video and the live performance] — that's very clear without either one being dominant.

MP: So that means I can confront myself, my image, onstage. We can multiply; at times there are twenty of us onstage. Our bodies and costumes are used as screens as well so for example, in Under the Skin, there's a section where [Bridgman's] lower body is projected on me and vice-versa, my upper body on him. We're working a lot with identity and questioning identity, and questioning perception itself. We really play with the audience's perception of what is real and what is image. Sometimes we create something that's purposefully ambiguous in that way.

In your most recent piece, Double Expose, you've moved towards a more cinematic feel. Why are you using more film-inspired images?

MP: Our work over the past ten years has been a blending of choreography, live performance and video projection. We're often working with our life size image. And as we've gotten more and more into this, the work has grown more and more cinematic... In this piece, we went a little further in our exploration of cinema in that we are looking at archetypal characters that come from... classic American cinema...

We're kind of looking at cinema as contemporary mythology, in that we've seen so many film and television shows and those images and those characters become integrated into our consciousness — I think in a similar way to how mythology served earlier cultures. So we're using that concept as a way of showing the many sides of any one person.

With so many different elements going into a dance piece – the music, videography and choreography – how collaborative is the creation process?

MP: [Videographer Peter Brobow] is an integral part of the process. We might come up with a a choreographed idea and a way we would interact with the video imagery, and he brings his technological expertise and his artistic eye. So he's behind the camera, and he is editing. We do all the editing with him in our studios so that we can edit, project, choreograph, go back to re-editing, re-choreographing, then do that process about a thousand times until we get the results that we want.

AB: Our composer, Ken Field, is as well. He lives in Boston; we live in New York and we would often send music files and video files back and forth. What we like about the parallel creative process is that Ken wears several different hats — he has a Mardi Gras band but he does a lot of experimental, layered saxophones where he will explore new facets of sound with four or five different saxophone tracks moving and playing with each other, and seeing how the tonality changes over time.

What roles do each of you play in the development of a dance piece?

MP: Once a dance is finished, it would be really hard for us to go back and say whose idea was what or who did what, because it is really a result of an ongoing conversation between the two of us. One of us might have an idea and will mention it to the other and then that person starts brainstorming and getting ideas from that.

We bounce back and forth and usually the end result is somewhat like the beginning idea, but transformed by the collaboration... We've been working together for a long time so it's been an ongoing conversation — each piece is a new evolution of that.

AB: I totally agree! I think our roles are not rigidly defined in collaboration, I don't think you necessarily want that. We both bring a lot of energy toward movement invention as well as structure and what really is necessary from time to time is to step back and see what you have, and kind of close your eyes and say, "Is this what I was thinking? Is this what I wanted?" to keep one's outside eye active and fresh.

Is there any divide between your dance life and your personal life?

MP: We try as much as possible to keep those separate —

AB: And we succeed sometimes. (Both laugh.)

MP: What we're putting onstage is not our personal relationship — it has to be bigger than that. It has to be more universal.

---

Bridgman/Packer Dance: Double Expose will be playing at the Long Center April 11-12 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rollins Theatre. Click here to purchase tickets.