Into the light

Collaboration fuses dance with projections, music, and more in a multimedia experience

ALLSTON - The dark cavern of the warehouse exudes the industrial anxiety of "Blade Runner." A high ceiling soars away ominously, and the corners are shrouded in a murk that could easily be hiding something or someone. Along a back wall, three figures seem trapped in a large, glowing box while two others sit in front of smaller glowing boxes.

A disembodied voice calls out: "The bubbles are what happens right after the pink?"

A pause, then everyone in the room guffaws at the absurd-sounding (but, as it turns out, completely practical) query.

The cavern is a spacious Allston rehearsal studio for Kinodance Company, the smaller boxes are laptop monitors from which film (those bubbles) and stage lighting (the pink) are being projected onto the large box, and the disembodied voice is a musician trying to figure out his cue. There's even a sweet dog named Doris, greeting newcomers with an eagerly wagging tail.

As any performing group can attest, rehearsals increase in tension and intention the closer showtime gets; indeed, the warehouse atmosphere is pulsating as Kinodance pushes through its final week of rehearsals before performances tonight and tomorrow at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Artists from multiple disciplines - filmmaker Alla Kovgan, set designer Dedalus Wainwright, choreographer/dancers Alissa Cardone and Ingrid Schatz, musician/composer Roger Miller (Mission of Burma, Alloy Orchestra), lighting designer Kathy Couch, and guest dancers DeAnna Pellecchia and Stephanie Lanckton - are weaving their crafts into the performance piece "Fuse," one of two works that Kinodance will premiere this weekend in a program presented by CRASHarts.

Kinodance shares the concert with Lorraine Chapman The Company. While both groups are rooted in postmodern dance - and, coincidentally, both have been listed among Dance Magazine's "Top 25 to Watch in 2008" - their styles are very different, suggesting the making of an aesthetically stimulating evening. While Kinodance is truly a multimedia ensemble, Chapman focuses on long, driving dance phrases punctuated by surprising movements that suggest the strangest of creatures.

"We are happy to present artists who appeal to audiences that are more adventurous in spirit," says World Music/CRASHarts executive director Maure Aronson. In an e-mail, Chapman discusses the gift of being presented by CRASHarts, saying the two companies are freed from "the struggles and the costs of self-producing. . . . This allows us to focus on the artistic."

Indeed, "artist collaborative" and "artist collective" are the terms Kinodance's members use to describe themselves. "We often don't even think of ourselves as a dance company," Cardone says. Rather, "dance is kind of like the glue" that ultimately binds the disparate components together.

Cardone, filmmaker Kovgan, and visual artist Wainwright cofounded Kinodance in 1999, and all three cite the way one artist's mode of expression can be enhanced by the others'. When Kovgan and Cardone first met, "Alla wanted to make a film to express a certain idea that she felt she couldn't express in any other way except through movement." Cardone says. "She was from Moscow, English wasn't her first language, and in many ways dance became the language that she was able to talk through."

In an e-mail, Wainwright recalls his own initial discussions with Kovgan. "The possibility of synthesizing a work out of multiple textures was exciting, and gave me a way to try to realize some ideas I had as well as opening me up to ideas I had not known were in me."

Wainwright's contribution to "Fuse" is that large, glowing box. It's based on the "lumia box," an invention by the early 20th-century artist Thomas Wilfred that created a play of colors and shapes through light, not unlike a television. Wainwright's 21st-century version of the lumia box has openings that allow for cunning entrances and escapes. At times the dancers look imprisoned; at other times they're empowered, as they effortlessly swing up, catch hold of the ceiling, flip upside down, and hang like bats. It all adds to a state of beautiful unreality.

There are no actual words in "Fuse" or "Behemoth," the other Kinodance premiere. But for the viewer, there's a lot to take in. Judging from the "Fuse" rehearsal, elements have been so carefully blended that what happens is mesmeric. The "Blade Runner" feeling is not random; the iconic film is one of the inspirations for "Fuse." Kovgan's images are often eerily evocative, like the displaced blue flicker from a TV in another room. Even when the action becomes frenetic, it's hypnotically so. And some of the most powerful work comes in the slower, more ambient sections, which build to a surprisingly emotional pitch.

Perhaps the synthesis works because the artists are so plugged into their peers' disciplines. Wainwright muses about the fact that he finds himself to be "more inspired by some music, movies, and performances . . . rather than necessarily visual arts." Fortunately, he says, "most of the time this irony inspires me."

Cardone describes her college self as being both a "total cinema junkie" and a "music freak," and she notes that Kovgan is "so used to dissecting movement in the film frame, so she understands those tiny little details, the transitions that can make or break choreography."

As for Kovgan, she points out, "A film may evoke a dancelike feeling even when it does not involve dancers at all."