Artist Spotlight: Louisa Pancoast & Diego Funes
Name: Louisa Pancoast
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Goffstown, New Hampshire
Role in Mixily Presents: Presented Artist (Choreographer/Performer)
Current Pandemic Anthem (Musical, Culinary, Dealer’s Choice): The Lagoons, anything with peanut sauce or sweet potatoes (COVID taught me how to cook), and bike riding!
Name: Diego Funes
Pronouns: he/him
Hometown: New York, New York
Role in Mixily Presents: Presented Artist (Choreographer/Director)
Current Pandemic Anthem (Musical, Culinary, Dealer’s Choice):
Music: Samuel Barber, Berguzar Korel, and Aykut Gurel
Food: Hummus, tzatziki, variations on chickpeas
Dealer’s Choice: red wine
If you would, would you tell us the story of your most triumphant moment as a theatre artist during this period known as 2020?
LP: Mixily Presents was my first opportunity to work alongside Diego as a co-choreographer, which was very exciting. Also turning my kitchen into a playground. I’m very proud that none of the cabinet doors came crashing off their hinges.
DF: To be able to co-create and direct a choreoplay within the span of a week, with three time zones, three different states, and to perform it live was very unique.
How has doing Zoom performance challenged you and/or made you grow as an artist?
LP: My sense of detail and nuance had to be so much larger than it would be on a film camera or performing live. In Zoom, the visual quality is a little lower, timing is jumpier. Because of that it’s so easy for smaller movements to get lost. Knowing how to retain the quality of the movement, but make it legible over the stream took some finessing.
DF: Timing is different, camera angles are different, you get a sense of depth and how bodies traverse space, but you, as an audience, only ever get one point of view. You have to consider not only how the body operates in the space, but how the space and the body operate in the frame of the computer screen. Which is fascinating, too. Everyone is watching on a different device, a different size screen. It’s exciting to know that we are producing work for an innumerable amount of scales and resolutions.
Photo Credit: Forrest Simmons
Photo Credit: Mike Esperanza
UN[FAZED] | Choreography by Louisa Pancoast & Diego Funes, Original Music by Damian Martinez, Filming by Nicholas Krepshaw, Premiered at the Sanskar Virtual Dance Festival, and Development Supported by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership
What’s your current thesis on livestream vs live Zoom performance vs pre-recorded video and the lines between theatre vs film vs ??? (ie: When’s the moment for you that it stops being theatre, if ever?)
LP + DF: The moment you put something on video it’s film - that is the way it exists forever, as it stood when you filmed it. Livestream vs Zoom is slippery. Livestream seems a bit more impersonal - no one really knows whether or not you’re there. Zoom, however, is more participatory. Whether you can see the audience or not, they always have the option to make their voice heard. Theater is the most intimate, you’re breathing the same air, sharing the same space. The moment you add in a screen, that’s a performance.
Any secret Zoom/tech-theatre workarounds or cheats you’d be willing to share with the internet?
LP: If you need a set change, you just change the location of your camera, it’s that easy. My apartment looked like three entirely different set designs simply because I moved my laptop to a different surface.
DF: Just because you ask someone to turn on their video feed doesn’t mean they need to turn it on immediately! As the director (and stage manager), we had to coordinate entrances and exits like clockwork. I often sent requests for the dancers to turn on their cameras far before their music cue, then they could just on their feed and go the second they needed to “enter.”
Plugs, Upcoming Shows, Website & Social Links, Here Please!:
LP + DF: Our new work-in-progress UN[FAZED] was recently presented at the Sanskar Virtual Festival in India, and our quarantine dance film, Absence, has been accepted into fifteen festivals and won four awards thus far!
For more of Louisa & Diego’s Work: Absence (Trailer) | Interior Dialogues (a past work)
Louisanpancoast.com | Defunesdance.com | IG: @louisanpancoast | @diegofun