In early August the question was popped to Shobana Jeyasingh. Her reply betrayed a note of weary bewilderment. "What's NOT up? This has turned itself into a monster project." But beneath the veneer of exhaustion was more than a glimmer of exhilaration. Jeyasingh is on a hunt to make maverick technology work for her in a dance context.

"Greenwich started all this," the London-based choreographer confesses. "It's the distances that interested me, and the huge, curvy lines in the main hall - like a motorway." She's refering to Greenwich Dance Agency, the venue where she's preparing her newest work for presentation in Umbrella 2002. "It's a place with incredible potential. You need a huge budget to exploit everything it has to offer."

Umbrella, Jeyasingh's own eponymous company, ResCen (the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts at Middlesex University) and Greenwich Dance Agency have joined forces to realise a project she describes as "a trilogy of events: a live webcast, pre-filmed images and two dancers in real time." In a reversal of the usual procedure, the audience for [h]Interland will sit onstage facing what Jeyasingh envisions as a multi-layered canvas. The main floor and balcony will be occupied as live performance areas by dancers Mavin Khoo and Sowmya Gopalan, but they will also be used as projection spaces.

The most novel, complicated element of the performance is a live video streaming from India to Britain. In an arty expansion of teleconferencing - "What newscasters use," Jeyasingh explains - dancer Chitra Srishailan will be beamed into the venue from a rooftop in Bangalore. "I want to transfer her 'Bangalore-ness' to Greenwich," says Jeyasingh. Working with Terry Braun, she's hit upon the idea of a static camera. "I'm trying to choreograph an arithmetically precise, 45-minute dance script where the dancer edits herself for the camera." Additionally, she wants to present pre-recorded footage of Banaglore - "not a social document or travelogue, but a series of visual poems" - by Peter Gomes, her collaborator on the recent work Phantasmaton.

"Between the idea and its realisation are so many variables," Jeyasingh philosophises. "But I felt at the end of that piece that I got exactly what wanted." With [h]Interland she's discovering "what we need and seeing how we can do it. It's a huge undertaking. It's juggling the concept of what's possible while educating one's self in what's possible. Just knowing what software to use is a full-time job." Despite the fact that Bangalore is situated in what Jeyasingh dubs as "the Silicon Valley of India," she says there's no model for what she's trying to accomplish. "There IT and the arts haven't quite shaken hands yet. The technology is there for business. It's fine to see people's heads talk. We're demanding a lot more. We want the image to move."

Jeyasingh has entitled [h]Interland with very specific punctuation to indicate a remnant or hint. She thinks of it as "a facility for accessing other things. It says something about the geography between spaces." The lighting design is by her frequent collaborator, Lucy Carter. Jeyasingh found Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy through research (talking to people, getting her hands on lots of CDs). The first part of the performance is a piece of his which stipulates that, of the two vocalists he's using, one has blue hair and the other red. It's going to be a lively evening.

WHO: SHOBANA JEYASINGH DANCE COMPANY
WHAT: [h]INTERLAND
WHEN: THU 24 - SAT 26 OCT
WHERE: GREENWICH

Donald Hutera writes regularly on dance and arts for The Times, Evening Standard, Time Out, Dance Europe, Dance Magazine (US) and Dance Now. He is co-author, with Allen Robertson, of The Dance Handbook. This interview first appeared in the Spring 2002 edition of Dance Umbrella News.