Halo : Ballet Evolved.
To place this post in context, I was just to first say that today is a very good day! Today is the day I found out that I got accepted to York University’s Communications & Culture program, as an MA candidate. While the program doesn’t start until september, I am eager to get back into academics and take the culture that I write about on this blog and apply a critical/ academic eye to it. It’s very exciting for me, this idea of studying game culture, hacker culture and art at the Master’s Level. Anyway when sharing the good news with my friends via that ever present social networking site we’re all plugged into, a friend of mine (Paul Walde. a rather brilliant artist if you ask me) told me that I should look at Halo: The Ballet as something notable to examine in my pending studies. HALO? THE BALLET?
Yes. and Yes. Halo, the Ballet was produced as part of the X AVANT New Music Festival V in October 2010 and was produced by Gregory Oh. Essentially Halo the ballet was a sort of live machinima performance, wherein 3 Halo Avatars (they called them Halorinas, which is kind of funny), were controlled by 3 “dancers” at laptops, while a 4th “player acted as the performance’s camera, ensuring that the performance was always well framed in the game space. Prior to this performance, which I would love to see live, I never really heard of “live machinima” before, but it’s a very interesting concept. So much machinima is plotted out and planned in a very cinematic way, scripts are written, shots are blocked, then “performed” then recorded then all the pieces are really put together in post-production. But to do this live, without the ability to edit it to polish it up, it sounds like a precision job to be sure.
you can read the orig article I found about this performance here, as was published by the Torontoist.
and above is some footage of the troupe during a rehearsal for the performance.
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