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  michaelmontanaro

Frankenstein's Ghosts-Trailer
Frankenstein's Ghosts-Trailer

Frankenstein's Ghosts 
Interactive performance piece - 2009-2011

Frankenstein’s Ghosts is a collaborative creation-research project. The aim of the project is to generate a hybrid performance work based on the substantive issues raised in Mary Shelley’s novel

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Practices of Everyday Life / Cooking-Trailer
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Practices of Everyday Life -Cooking 
Premiere scheduled for Spring 2013

A performance choreographed around a chef and sonified objects: fruit, vegetables, meat, knives, pots and pans, cutting board and table. 

Cooking*, the most ancient art of transmutation, has become over a quarter of a million years an unremarkable, domestic practice. But in this everyday practice, things perish, transform, nourish other things. Enchanting the fibers, meats, wood and metal with sound and painterly light, we stage a performance made from the moves (gestures) of cooking, scripted from the recipes of cuisine both high and humble. Panning features virtuosic chefs who are also movement artists, such as Tony Chong. "Cooking"is the first part in a series of performances exploring how everyday gestures/events could become charged with symbolic intensity.

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A River of Poetry -Trailer
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A River of Poetry
Interactive performance- 2010

The program for the most part evokes cosmopolitan Montreal as a place, as well as humanity's fraught relation to technology. It includes the reading of full poems and extracts in several languages, accompanied by projections and voice recordings.  The evening's performance is transformed into a multimedia experience in which technology responds instantaneously to the individual poet's expression, voice, speech pattern, pitch and gesture. Ultimately, the technology is harnessed to enhance the evening's intimacy.

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Varekai -Trailer
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Varekai 
Cirque du Soleil - 2002

Deep within a forest, at the summit of a volcano, exists an extraordinary world - a world where something else is possible. A world called Varekai. From the sky falls a solitary young man, and the story of Varekaibegins. Parachuted into the shadows of a magical forest, a kaleidoscopic world populated by fantastical creatures, this young man sets off on an adventure both absurd and extraordinary. On this day at the edge of time, in this place of all possibilities, begins an inspired incantation to life rediscovered. The word Varekai means "wherever" in the Romany language of the gypsies the universal wanderers. This production pays tribute to the nomadic soul, to the spirit and art of the circus tradition, and to the infinite passion of those whose quest takes them along the path that leads to Varekai.         Press Kit  en   /   Press Kit  fr

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time in the eye of the needle -  Interactive performance piece / University of Arizona - 1995

Time in the Eye of the Needle is a work which deals, on a personal level, with the experiences generally associated with the migration of peoples and cultures. The performance takes place within a virtual stage environment where lights, music, video, graphics, and robots are controlled through video cameras. Video is input into a computer and processed to sense the positions and motions of the dancers within certain locations in the video field. The number, location, and types of sensors within the video field are different at any given time in the performance are choreographed to provide responses to dancers actions within particular time frames. Information is extracted from the space and represented as impulses which are manipulated and communicated to media controllers on other computers. Media controllers act as agents for the sensing system and operate according to a set of instructions which tell them how to behave when controlling particular media (lights, sound, video, etc.). These behaviors are seen by the viewer as mediated responses, from lightingchanges, to computer graphics interactions, to complex interacting musical scores

Time in the Eye of the needle-Trailer

litany- 1997

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not angles but angels -  Interactive performance piece - 1995

Not Angels but Angels was a full evening work that dealt with an abstracted and non-linear history of the world and the internal working of inspiration and imagination.

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Duet - Simon Allarie, Sandra Lapierre


Zman Doe  -  Interactive performance piece - Montreal Old Port - hangar 8 - 1993

Created in 1989, Zman Doe was a large scale multi-media production produced and performed in an abandoned hangar in the old port of Montreal. With a performing space measuring 300 feet by 90 feet, the work was a seamless blend of dance, film, film animation, slide projections, and music. It was a work that at the time helped define the relationship between the performing and electronic arts.

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