Dots

An ensemble work made for Keene State College in early 2020 — and a dance that was never performed live. When the pandemic closed the theater, the choreography moved into Unreal Engine, where lighting, set, and spacing could keep being designed long after the room went dark.

Dots began in January 2020 as a group piece set on student dancers at Keene State College — built in the theater itself, on a marley floor under house and work lights, with the fly system and lighting grid in plain view. The rehearsals worked through the vocabulary of the dance: lines forming and dissolving, dancers reaching into a single connected chain, unison phrases breaking into staggered counterpoint across the stage.

Then the pandemic arrived, and the premiere never happened. Rather than let the work disappear, I rebuilt the stage inside Unreal Engine and kept designing. The rehearsal video — shot in that same theater space — became reference footage inside the scene, and I placed 3D actors on a virtual recreation of the stage to keep working the questions a live tech rehearsal would normally answer: where does the light fall, how does the set frame the bodies, and how does spacing read from the house when you can change the lighting state at will.

The Unreal project turned the cancellation into a design laboratory. Spacing could be measured and re-measured against the actual dimensions of the stage. Lighting could be pushed to extremes — from full work lights down to a single low-key wash where dancers emerge from near-total black — without waiting for a hang or a focus call. The dark studies below are lighting states tested in that space; the lighter images document the dance as it lived in the room, before it moved into the engine.