Bridgeman Parker Dance's UNDER THE SKIN & VOYEUR Coming to SteelStacks, 3/28-29

On March 28-29, 8 p.m., Guggenheim Fellows in dance choreography Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer are bringing Under The Skin and Voyeur, their highly acclaimed work integrating live performance, digital technology and the visual arts, to the Fowler Blast Room of the ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks in Bethlehem. In a series of works created from 2001 to the present, these two dance innovators have explored the intersection of the live and the virtual, probing the themes of identity and perception while posing the question: "What is real and what is image?"

This spellbinding cabaret performance includes Bridgman | Packer's newest work Voyeur, which pushes their exploration of the live and virtual into new territory choreographically, thematically, and technologically. With digital images of Edward Hopper's paintings as a point of departure, Voyeur bears witness to fragmented moments of private lives. The production includes an installation component, where before each performance the audience is invited to enter the set to explore the digital projections. The creative team includes filmmaker Peter Bobrow, sound designers Scott Lehrer and Leon Rothenberg, and lighting designer Frank DenDanto III.

"With Voyeur they unpack and, more than that, press the aesthetic and dramatic power of Hopper's work ... the rhythmic flickers of the choreography, lighting, video, and audio prove mesmerizing ... Voyeur assumes a life of its own," says Diana Tuite, Art Historian and Co-Curator of "Edward Hopper's Maine" at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

The evening also includes Under the Skin, a duet that explodes into a magically populated stage as Bridgman and Packer interchange with their ever-multiplying virtual selves. The performers' bodies and costumes become projection screens, creating a morphing and redefinition of identities. The Boston Globe calls it, "The most thrilling dance work this reviewer has seen in recent memory ... flat-out exhilarating."

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