By Elizabeth Labbe-Webb, Executive Director
Core Dance is celebrating our 40th anniversary. It’s quite an accomplishment. We’ve been a fixture on the Decatur Square for more than 35 of those years. We’ve seen Decatur change and grow to be one of the most vibrant parts of the Greater Atlanta area and we’ve managed to make ourselves an undeniable part of that vibrancy. Our studio space on the square is our home, our creative center, and it’s a resource for our community because we make it available for rent to other artists and nonprofits at very, very affordable prices.
Interestingly, this willingness to share our space sometimes works against us. As recently as four years ago, we would hear visitors to the Decatur Square wonder what went on in our building as they passed by. In an effort to make more of a visual mark, we repainted the exterior of our buildings, adding logos and banners that declared that we are a “dance space.” As part of this re-do, we added 4-foot-by-5-foot photos to our front windows that showcased our programming to the outside world: one photo brought forth our Artful Sustenance program and another photo gave those passing by a glimpse of our Movement Based Research program. We also hung 48-inch TV’s in the windows. The TV’s played continuous slide shows about our programs and upcoming events, and showed videoclips from performances.
For about a year, these improvements got serious attention from those passing by our front windows . Visitors to the square would ask staff, “How long have you been here?” and exclaim “I love these pictures.” Then “inattentional blindness” set in. The changes became part of the everyday visual clutter. People even started using the shadows in the photographs as mirrors to check their hair!
“What to do next?” we wondered. How do we translate the vibrancy generated inside our studio through our windows and then out into the world? How do we get people interested in what we are doing when they are our downtown Decatur neighbors?
We knew that at least part of the answer was that we needed new technology. We were greatly inspired by the work that the Springer Opera House did to bring life to the exterior of their building through LCD screens that “turned the Springer inside out” and showed people outside what was happening inside on the stage.
We had five 8-foot windows facing one of the busiest areas in the city. What could WE do to use technology and move our internal artistic vibrancy to audiences on the street?
Then we found these.
Transparent displays, controlled by a central computer interface, could show moving images without blocking the light that made the studio such a pleasant place to to dance, to gather, and to work.
The transparent display screens allowed us to change the images frequently — something we couldn’t do with photographs — and their size meant we could hang several allowing for some creativity on HOW an image was perceived across the expanse of windows. Since it would be easy to change the images displayed, we could offer screens to video installation artists in the community, our long-term studio renters, and others who wanted to publicize their own programs. We saw potential!
We were excited about the possibility of more of Decatur’s residents, shoppers, diners, and fellow workers knowing about CORE Dance, engaging with us, and becoming part of our growing audience. After all, we deduced, proximity matters. Many of these people were near us every single day.
But the transparent display screens were expensive. Low-end versions at the size we needed were upwards of $10,000 each. Armed with information, a sound concept to grow a segment of our audience, and a solid budget, we applied for an Audience Building Roundtable grant from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, and we began to look for artists and technicians that had used this technology to help us plan the installation.
We were introduced to a fabulous video artist in the early fall of 2019. Adam Larsen helped us to refine our vision, the results we would achieve, how we would achieve them, and we began laying out exactly what we would need to purchase to make it all a reality.
As the project progressed, Adam introduced us to a gooey film that we could apply to our entire studio window, turning all 160 square feet of our view onto the square into a transparent projector screen! With the right projector set-up, people standing outside our windows could watch dance flow across our windows — just as they would on a stage!
When we received our grant funding from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation in December 2019 and were able to implement the project, we began to think about the next step, with our new potential audience members, which will be the invitation to engagement to those who stop at the windows.
I would be lying if I said this project was easy. Learning how the technology worked, finding the right set-up, and understanding how to keep the equipment safe in the midst of the COVID-19 shutdowns has been an ongoing challenge for our entire organization.
On May 6, 2020 we debuted our “new windows” with a video installation specially created for the event: “inside:out 1.0”. https://www.facebook.com/coredance/videos/d41d8cd9/1187255911626613/?__so__=permalink&__rv__=related_videos
On May 23, 2020, we opened this year’s EnCore Dance on Film festival. This festival normally takes place inside the studio during the Decatur Arts Festival. This year, because of this project, we can share it while social distancing, and it will be available for viewing all summer long. Take a look at our facebook page for video of the windows in action: https://www.facebook.com/coredance.
If you are interested in joining us for EnCore Dance on Film, there is also a registration link on our page to view the entire festival from vimeo: https://www.coredance.org/encore-dance-on-film.html.
So far, as more people return to downtown Decatur, we are seeing new interest in our organization — and we continue to plan for all of the ways that we can utilize our new “video display windows” to show audiences our work and the work of our partners.