Photos: gloATL’s ‘Search for the Exceptional’
At the Old Fourth Ward Skatepark
- Dustin Chambers
- The show begins with a lone dancer in the middle of a bowl, as Micah Stansells video installation begins to glow.
gloATL performed its final night of The Search for the Exceptional at the Old Fourth Ward Skatepark. The show was in collaboration with filmmaker Micah Stansell, whose original vision was to project video he shot of the dancers onto the bowls of the skatepark. But the city of Atlanta required the lights remain on for the skaters, which would have washed out the projections. Instead, the videos were presented on a series of iPads in a central area of the park.
As a note, the show was greatly augmented and stripped down due to a lack of skaters in the park on Sunday night. A large aspect of the performance centered around the dancers’ interactions with skaters at the park, that they would zoom by a dancer and somehow affect their movement. Lauri Stallings, gloATL’s founder and choreographer, felt that the piece wouldn’t be honest to the space if there weren’t other naturals forces, like skaters, to interact with.