Kinetic Echoes
WORK DESCRIPTION
Kinetic Echoes is an exploration of sound and movement, using the contemporary form to explore sound through a visual form. The work utilizes wearable technology produced by Instruments of Things© and funded through a Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Grant to translate the dancer’s movement in their own kinesphere into various sounds. Fundamentally, this work serves to investigate the relationship between movement and sound, allowing us to answer the question of "What does dance sound like?"
Kinetic Echoes 2.0 is a rework of Linebach’s original Kinetic Echoes. Both works seek to answer one fundamental question - “What does dance sound like?” Kinetic Echoes 2.0 uses wearable technology to translate each dancer’s movements within their kinesphere into whimsical compositions of instruments, exploring the intersection of movement and sounds through the lens of contemporary dance and allowing the movement to influence the music and sounds. Rather than individual sounds and accenting in Kinetic Echoes, the quartet of dancers layer the choreography to produce complex compositions, becoming multi-dimensional instruments through shared movement phrases.
Kinetic Echoes and its various reworkings have been performed for both the 2024 Cleveland Dance Festival and the 2025 ROOTS Showcase produced by Ballet Legato. Interestingly, the reworks were restaged due to a shift in available technology. The original version of Kinetic Echoes utilized the wearable accelerometers from IoT© to produce the sounds (with respective software) and LiDAR dancer tracking in the stage space to control the on/off sound of the wearable technology. The restaging at Cleveland Dance Festival developed the use of the wearable technology further so that the on/off function of the sounds was dancer-controlled through synchronous movement
CHOREOGRAPHER
Joel K. Linebach
COSTUME DESIGN
Joel K. Linebach
DANCERS
Kinetic Echoes: Joel K. Linebach, Dani Dowler, Claire Christie, Katherine Averill
Kinetic Echoes 2.0: Joel K. Linebach, Cal Condiff, Lauren Satink, Bird Thurman
SOUND DESIGN
Joel K. Linebach
PREMIERE DATE
Kinetic Echoes: March 21st, 2024
Kinectic Echoes 2.0: November 23rd, 2024
PREMIERE LOCATION
Kinetic Echoes: Karen Potter Studio Theatre, Department of Dance, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
Kinetic Echoes 2.0: Ariel LaSalle Theater, Cleveland, OH (Cleveland Dance Festival)
