Bella Palermo, lead dancer and actor of The Bella Ribbons Project, will present special contemporary dance performances within Tripping the Light Fantastic intermittently on both nights of the PASEO.

Tripping the Light Fantastic at the PASEO invites the audience to engage with current interactive technology to choreograph their own Screendance experience. As people activate sensors by moving their body, videos of dancers leaping, floating, and twisting in the air are triggered in realtime and projected on a large-scale. The participant’s movements act as a composer, activating the dancers movements in this chromatic, time altering, and gravity-free universe of color, light, and sound.

Screendance hybridizes filmic works and movement to evoke a new relationship between dance and the moving image. Both are intricately intertwined and function as one singular work. The choreography lives only as it is rendered in either film, video or digital technologies. Tripping the Light Fantastic takes it a step further in that each Screendance that is created is ephemeral, disappearing with the end of every interaction and reappearing in a new form with the next participant. The idiom ‘trip the light fantastic’ means to dance in an imaginative and nimble manner. Its 17th century roots are in the poem L’Allegro written by John Milton: “Come, and trip it as you go / On the light fantastic toe.” A paradoxical phrase, it cannot be translated literally, thus it evokes a feeling of absurdity. It is also an illustrative statement that compels one to think of an Alice-in-Wonderland-type environment, a prismatic playland, or a disco. Tripping the Light Fantastic, by Heather Marie Bergerson, Seth D. Myers, Sarah Stolar, and Enrico Trujillo, is made specifically for the PASEO with the enchanting and psychedelic qualities of Taos in mind.

Tripping the Light Fantastic is an interactive installation that expands upon a larger body of work called The Bella Ribbons Project. This project is a collaborative effort by Seth D. Myers and Sarah Stolar with invited collaborators. It is a multidisciplinary body of work that investigates the relationship of nature and grace, time and space, dream and waking states, while exploring beauty, darkness, and truth through ethereal landscapes constructed in the psyche of a young girl. The project includes video installation, single-channel video, short film, photography, drawing, sculpture, and ephemera. Bella, an experimental short film, is the genesis of the project and integrates multiple genres of time-based media into one cohesive cinematic work. This unique work uses a mashup of techniques seen in commercial music videos, video art, travel vlogs, Screendance, and traditional cinema to weave a spiritual and psychological journey of a young fairytale-like dancer. Tripping the Light Fantastic remixes footage shot during the production of Bella to pull the viewer out of the position of voyeur and place them directly in her vivid world.

About the artist: Tripping the Light Fantastic is created by Heather Marie Bergerson, Seth D. Myers, Sarah Stolar, and Enrico Trujillo for the PASEO and The Bella Ribbons Project.
Heather is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist. She is a BFA candidate at UNM, recently receiving her AFA degree from UNM-Taos, where she is also currently an Art Department work/study. Enrico is a painter new media artist, and the Multimedia Development Specialist for the UNM-Taos Digital Media Department. Seth D. Myers is an artist, filmmaker, and educator whose award winning creative work ranges from experimental video to short films to large scale video installations. Sarah Stolar is an interdisciplinary Feminist artist who works from a vast technical perspective, including painting, drawing, multi-media installation, film, video and performance art. Seth and Sarah both received their MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003 and have been collaborating on artistic projects and academic research since. Currently, Seth is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Loras College and Sarah Stolar is the Chair of the Art Department at UNM-Taos. Together, they co-created The Bella Ribbons Project with Heather and Enrico as participating collaborators.

PASEO 2019 Education & Engagement Partner