Colina 2006 Website
Performance Reviews || Monday, 8 May, 2006
Online reporting of dance projects as they happen is a rare concept in contemporary dance so when they do pop up on the net we prick up our ears and take notice.
Colina 2006 was one such project that took place within this very city (Newcastle upon Tyne) just a couple of weeks ago and the organisers had the good sense to provide a website that was, ideally, to be updated on a daily basis with reports, video and images from the projects protagonists.
The project itself was a research event lasting 14 days that brought together artists from across Europe of many disciplines to work together not to produce new work, but to experiment with ideas that could potentially lead to full blown projects in the future.
Colina’s online presence is a bright yellow affair with a simple three column layout, a permanent list of links across the top bar and a rather pointless, randomly loaded logo (the logo isn’t pointless, just the random loader). Sections provide information on the artists taking part, via a long list of questions, details of the individual projects they are working on, a latest news page and a break down of the considerable number of ‘team’ members that providing support to the artists during the project.
From a design point of view it is an uninspiring muddle and tells a story of either being constructed in haste or planned with no real care or thought for the poor souls that are supposed to read it. Text is displayed in a haphazard fashion (light grey on a white background) with poor paragraph breaks and no sense of presentation or flair. Again users have been ignored in favour of just getting information, such as it is, out there.
Video diaries are a great way to keep users up to date with what is going on with such a complex project. Colina 2006 has 8 such diaries and we were promised one for each day. Sadly, they must have gotten bored because the remaining six are nowhere to be seen. Of the videos that are there almost all of them are pointless because they provide us with little or no context as to what or why we are supposed to be watching them. A lot of the filming is underexposed and poorly composed to boot. Nice idea shame about the execution.
Video material is also present for some of the projects and two of them, Van (Stability Instability) and Dance in the Air are well thought out ideas and Air is presented in a watchable format on the site (albeit at 12 frames per second). It is a little over compressed however and bandwidth concerns will hardly be an issue with such a small amount of video material on one website.
Van however is un-watchable, running at a pointless 5 frames per-second and with unnecessary black matte bars on either side further constricting the view. The full quality version that was presented on the last day of the project was an interesting bit of film (dancers in the back of a moving van and the effects of shifting gravity on their movement), but here it is wasted.
The writing on the site also leaves a lot to be desired. Rambling swathes of text that say little or nothing to those unfamiliar with the project. One quote from the latest news page states;
“Two men meet across a table top – seedy, sleazy back bar room where the smoke rises already stale. No seductive aesthetic of monochrome silver screen here.”
Sounds like the pretentious drivel you would get in a French art house movie, it tells us nothing, so why write it and why publish it?
Overall you get the impression that the website is being used as an extension of the project which it most certainly is not. We have first hand accounts from those taking part that Colina 2006 was a valuable experience with a lot going on. Sadly nothing about this has come across through the website.
It’s a muddled mess of half finished ideas wrapped up in a poor design, the technical aspects have been badly implemented and the writing is risible. The site should have been used as a communications tool for the general public who were unable to see the the project first hand, at this the site fails on every single level.
We imagine it [the site] will now be left to languish on the internet, a ghost ship of an online presence serving no useful purpose other than to remind us that dance is living in the stone age of communications.
Stumble It!
