What you are looking at above, and we know you’re wondering, is a dancer from Hofesh Shechter [Dance Company]. We’re not sure which one it is, it might be the man himself, but it’s hard, very hard, to tell.
The image was captured during the live “web cast” from the Roundhouse Theatre in London this past Friday. If you want to know what the images looked like when they were actually moving then click on the video below and all will be revealed, minus sound unfortunately.
Here in TheLab™ we have a pathological dislike of London so it was with a happy heart we learned that the dance event of the year, or sommat, was going to be available online for all to see, for free, from the comfort of a rather nice office chair!
Of course it was an online – live – web video so we weren’t expecting Blue-Ray quality HD with surround sound but tiny Misnomer Dance from New York put on a watchable web cast all the way from the USA so we though, mistakenly, at least we will see what’s going on.
As you can see from the video above we had to give up after 5 minutes because what sort of fool sits back and watches something like that when they have Finding Nemo to hand?
You’ll have to forgive us now because we need to get arithmetical again. Using some technical tools we were able to monitor the video stream coming from the Roundhouse. At no point did the video stream ever shift more data than 76KB/s (Kilo Bytes per second). The video is also not running at 25 frames per second, it looks like 15.
Our, pre-recorded, video material shifts about 15 times as much data as that because we need to make it watchable because if it’s not watchable, then what’s the point?
The truth is the Roundhouse didn’t have the technical infrastructure to cope with the amount of data they needed to move, very few companies do outside of multi-million dollar corporations, so this was all a gimmick. If they had used an online streaming service provider, many of which are free, the video would still have been a bit lame but it would have been watchable, probably!
On a different tack our blogger on the ground, so to speak, Grotto, wrote up some coverage of the show and it appears a big problem for all concerned was the fact that most of the audience had to stand, on purpose.
Some folks, unable to see, gave up and left, much like we did with the online version, but they paid £12-£15 for their ticket. Didn’t it occur to somebody, anybody in a position of responsibility that something like that just might be an issue?
Choreography like this is something that needs to be savoured, looked at in detail so you can enjoy it, concentrate on it and focus. How the hell can you be on the edge of your seat if you don’t bloody well have one?
Dance is not, thank goodness, a rock concert.
So the Roundhouse and Hofesh Shechter [Dance Company] take a bloody nose on a couple of counts. What was the work like? Nobody seems to know!