Separated by nearly 2,400 miles, dancers from CWRU and musicians from the Cleveland Institute of Music plan to conquer time and distance October 29 to perform new choreography simultaneously at Mather Dance Center and at the University of Southern California's Bing Theater.

The CIM/CWRU collaboration, "Kinetic Shadows," is among seven performance works to be presented during the program, Cultivating Communities: Dance in the Digital Age, at the Fall 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting in Los Angeles. The new work demonstrates in real time the interactive and innovative advance-networking capabilities of Internet2 technology.

CIM and CWRU are members of the Internet2 research and development consortium, which focuses on advanced network applications within and across disciplines for research and learning opportunities, such as high fidelity real-time video and audio. The Bing Theater performance will illustrate Internet2 capabilities during the performing arts program that includes dance and music from around the United States.

What makes the choreography unusual is that three dancers will be in Cleveland along with three musicians while the other performers (three dancers and two musicians) will be in Los Angeles. The artists on Bing's stage will dance with projected images of the Cleveland dancers on three staggered, 12-foot screens to a work choreographed and conceived by Gary Galbraith, CWRU associate professor of dance and principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, with the assistance of Karen Potter, director of the CWRU dance program. Thomas Knab, CIM director of distance-learning networking, will use his knowledge of connecting musicians for educational classes at CIM to produce the Internet2 performance.

In November, encore performances of "Kinetic Shadows" will take place in Cleveland at CWRU during Mather Dance Center's fall dance concert, "Distant Connections," in which the two separate venues used for these performances will be CIM and CWRU. Performances will be at 8 p.m. November 7, 8 and 9, with a 2:30 p.m. matinee November 10. For the Cleveland performances, the "distant and musicians" will be at the Cleveland Institute of Music, connected to CWRU Mather Dance Center via the CWRU state-of-the-art network.

These performances are supported by the CWRU College of Arts and Sciences, under the direction of Dean Samuel Savin.

Videographer Mark Dumm will focus three cameras on the Cleveland dancers, with audio engineer Jennifer Shope coordinating the "surround" sound of the musicians. CIM's Greg Howe will operate the three super-fast modems called "codecs" that will send the three digital video and six audio channels to Los Angeles. CWRU network experts Eric Chan, Chet Ramey and Barron Hulver will make sure that all the digital media information flows from Cleveland to Los Angeles and back.

"It will be no easy task," Knab said.

Together sound and images will be video-streamed in an uncompressed bandwidth cross country at 300 million bits per second through the Internet2 network infrastructure to connections at the Bing Theater. To illustrate how fast information will travel, a home computer can send information at 56 thousand bits a second. Internet2 is 5,000 times faster.

Galbraith says that after weeks of practicing apart, the performers envision harmonizing sound and synchronizing movement in real time.

Kasumi, a video artist and filmmaker from Synapse Productions and faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Art, will create special video art, with set designs by Russ Borski, CWRU associate professor of theater arts.

Where timing is critical for dancers and musicians, the performers must cope with split-second time differences or Internet latency when they perform to "TimeSpan," a work for a brass quintet composed in 1986 by Margaret Brouwer, chair of CIM's composition department. The music contains complicated rhythmic patterns that make this difficult to perform. The quintet is being coached by CIM faculty members, who also are in the Cleveland Orchestra. The new choreography is approximately 14 minutes long.

The artists say delays in information relay have been reduced with Internet2 and the uncompressed videostreaming to approximately a tenth of a second.

"As their images and sound race across the Internet2, we think the delay is manageable," said Ann Doyle, program manager of the Internet2 arts and humanities initiative. She explains that many musicians tolerate similar delays in sound from the front of the stage to the back during performances.

"This performance is just the beginning. We want to support world symphonies, experimental dance movement, music and dance therapy and field testing of sound engineering and presentation projection systems that will extend this fusion of art and technology into an entirely new galaxy," said Lev Gonick, CWRU vice president for information technology services and chief information officer. Gonick adds that "multi-disciplinary collaboration in the arts will enable the technology community to contribute to multi-sensory learning which in and of itself represents a revolution in learning and pedagogy."

"This has been a widely interdisciplinary educational opportunity for our students, faculty and staff. We are all rapidly discovering, and actually implementing, new practices for human collaborations at the extreme frontier of our knowledge and craft," Knab said.

By taking place in the arts, this performance demonstrates that "state-of-the-world technologies" can serve an artistic vision, he added.

"This dance work uses this technology to enhance and extend dance theater, rather than the theater being used to showcase technology," Galbraith said. "For Kinetic Shadows, the integration of dance and music with technology is oriented in a way that focuses on how technology can serve the needs of these performing arts."

Karen Potter also says the people involved have had to focus on "creating art rather than using art to showcase and feature the technology."

As part of the CWRU Strategic Technology Alliance program, technology experts from the CWRU Office of Information Technology Services and the CIM Distance Learning Program are collaborating with corporate CWRU Integrated Technology Partners to extend the boundaries of real-time, media-rich, high-speed networked interactive performances.

"Kinetic Shadows" is also a "prototype" collaboration for the Center of Excellence for Advanced Network Applications in the Visual and Performing Arts planned for the CWRU-University Circle Advanced Technology Commons.

Sponsors supporting this CIM-CWRU-Internet2 collaboration include the Callahan Foundation, Sprint Corporation, Audio-Technica US, Cisco Systems, American Fiber Systems, Netgear, Dell Computers, Star Valley Solutions and Yamaha Corporation.

Tickets for the Cleveland performances in November are $10 for general admission, $7 for seniors over 60 years of age and CWRU personnel and $5 for students. For ticket reservations in Cleveland, call 368-6262.