project rainbow

Project Rainbow is an artist-research group comprised of Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artists Jesse Birch, Jade Boyd, Heidi Nutley and Sydney Vermont that explores the study of colour through film, movement and collaboration.

Colour is single, not as a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next.

-Walter Benjamin "Child's View of Colour"

Project Rainbow’s first collaboration, Variations on Green, looked to experimental filmmaker and dancer Maya Deren’s films as an entry point and inspiration for the exploration of the colour green through physical movement, film stills and projection. Variations on Green, a looped larger than life sized slide projection of a double-exposed dance of a single dancer on a green background, speaks of the optical unconscious (the perception of frozen motion enabled by film based media), and its socio-cultural implications. This concept formed a cohesive link to our following project: The Ruby Glass (Red). Variations on Green was featured at East Van Studio’s presentation for SWARM (a Vancouver-wide artist run centre festival) 2006.

Red, green’s after image, guided the following project, The Ruby Glass (2007/08). The Ruby Glass, which takes its name from the Werner Herzog’s 1976 film, Herz aus Glas is
a study of the colour red and its relationship to film, movement and collaboration. Herzog claimed to have hypnotized his actors in the filming of a pastoral village’s obsession with red glass. For us, Herzog’s film instigated a space of interrogation of movement that ranged from repressed and/or involuntary gestures to gestures of agency and/or control. The Ruby Glass, comprised of two pieces, an instructional video /dance montage, and a single steady-cam shot of a dance intervention, therefore, shared a critique of the institutionalization of knowledge and art production and offered intervention by opening a dialogue on the relationship of media to the physical body in motion. This two-part piece was shown as part of the Colour School programming schedule, created and curated by Kristina Lee Podesva.

Project Rainbow’s fourth dance and media based project, Blue, is an experimental film and dance documentary, that will be on exhibition from late January to late February 2010, at four venues in East Vancouver- Centre A, Solder and Sons, the Chinese Cultural Centre, and the Strathcona Community Centre- as well as on the LED screens at Robson and Granville. The film features the Canadian Women’s Ski Jumping Team in flight and in choreography based on their training and practice.

Project Rainbow began with L’Human Comedy, A Study of the Colour Yellow (sole director Sydney Vermont in collaboration with local choreographers Science Friction Productions). L’Human Comedy featured six dancers performing eight dances on digital video. The shifting movements of each dance arrangement shuffles, reconfigures and interprets the research themes, and translates the research from theoretical reference to gestural act. The film played continuously in the window of Artspeak Gallery for the month of August 2005.