Dancer makes leap to new visual media

Rosenberg blends arts for new performances

Precision is a requirement for woodworking. You need, says Doug Rosenberg, “clean lines.”

You need a certain degree of precision as well for dance, and for virtually any kind of art.

Rosenberg knows this well. An associate professor of dance, he has worked in wood all his life.

“My father taught me. I later worked as a carpenter to support myself through school and beyond. I have spent the last nine years remodeling our 100-year-old farmhouse. I did things like adding an entire story, gutting and rebuilding most of the rooms, redoing the kitchen and building a studio for both Chiao-Ping and myself,” he says.

Chiao-Ping is Rosenberg’s fellow dance faculty member Li Chiao-Ping. At the moment they are deep into a new dance film choreographed by Li. Rosenberg is directing and collaborating with Allen Kaeja, a Canadian dancer/choreographer. The film “Aroma: 5 Senses” will divide a half-hour into individual segments, each dedicated to one of the five senses. “Aroma” will air next spring on public broadcasting stations and Canadian television. After that, the film will tour on the international festival circuit.

Rosenberg has been eager to see how the senses play out through the rest of the body, in much the same way that wood is able to manifest an abstract idea or practical object.

“My work in dance and technology has to do with the body and its mediated representation,” says Rosenberg. “I am most interested in making hybrid work in which the combination of bodies in motion and video conspire to create a new reality only possible by the collusion of two separate art forms. My craft and woodworking background informs my media work in that I am very, very conscious of form, and most often make pieces that have clean lines in the same way that good architecture might.”

Since Rosenberg’s arrival on the UW–Madison campus more than a decade ago, he has built a solid and global reputation for creating a new language of performance, one that incorporates elements of dance, voice, text, video and projected images. For example, his Dziga Vertov Performance Group (named for a Russian filmmaker from the early 20th century), founded in 1989, brings together dance, performance and the visual arts.

However, Rosenberg does not neglect the scholarly component: He is just back from the Congress on Research and Dance conference in Vancouver, where he presented a paper on post-World War II Jewish artists using their various media as a way to “repair the world,” based on the traditional Jewish concepts.

“Jewish artists have persisted in making art to give voice to those who have none,” he says.

When the “Aroma” filming is over, Rosenberg will prepare for a show of his digital prints, which will open in January at the Color Elefante Gallery in Valencia, Spain.

“I refer to this new body of large-scale digital prints on canvas as ‘cinematographs,’ blending photography, film and painting in sequential prints. They merge medical imaging and performative self-portraits,” he says. Some of the prints in this same series were shown at the Abraham Lubelski Gallery in Beijing this past October. That show will travel in New York in April.

Rosenberg also is finishing a book on dance and video, “Dancing for the Camera: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image.” The book currently is being reviewed for publication.