Soul Leaves Her Body is an integrated-media performance synthesizing theatre, dance, live video, music, and cinema. Inspired by a 13th century Chinese story about a young woman who rips her soul from her body in order to pursue her destiny in the city, this original, contemporary work explores the soul-body relationship in today's networked, electronic culture. A team of international film, theatre, electronic music, and visual artists create a multi-channel film live onstage, mixing pre-recorded film with a multitude of onstage cameras. Lush cinematic visuals appear on ghostly moving panels, reshaping and obscuring the glass stage, while outside the cameras' frame we are drawn into a highly integrated folk dance for modern life.

Made possible with a lead residency and support from Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI); a development residency at Yaddo; and by an LMCC Swing Space grant.

We explore integrated-media in a workshop process that is collaborative, hands-on, informed by historical research of contemporary issues, and influenced by the human emotional relationship to electronic image-making, communication, and technology.  Whether a given piece takes place in the gallery, theatre, or public space, the work is always associated with a time-based form.  We mix non-actors and technicians together with skilled dancers, musicians, and performers to tell contemporary stories in a style that audiences have not experienced before.  Surrounded by immersive images and soundscapes, we hope to gain access to a portion of the audience’s consciousness that does not require explanation, and to surround them with an environment of visual and intellectual wonder and exploration.  Frequently calling into question the boundaries between technology, performance, and sculptural installation, the work engages viewers with rich imagery and inventive uses of digestible, integrated technological innovations.

PETER FLAHERTY (Co-Creator) is a video artist and director whose work has been seen in theatres, galleries, and museums internationally.  His most recent video art project, Pass Back a Revolver, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.  Recent video installations have been shown at: Nexus Gallery (Philadelphia), Fleisher-Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), the home of Agnes Gund (President Emerita of MOMA, NYC), and MIT Media Lab.  Past theatrical video design work includes: Francois Girard’s Flight of Lindbergh & Seven Deadly Sins at Opéra National de Lyon; The Builders Association’s SuperVision, Alladeen, and Avanti (international touring); Chen Shi-Zheng’s My Life As a Fairy Tale at Lincoln Center Festival; Bang On a Can’s Lost Objects at BAM; Basil Twist’s Dogugaeshi at The Japan Society; and Complicite’s The Elephant Vanishes (international touring).  He has been a Harvard University Artist-in-Residence, and has taught courses and workshops at Yale School of Drama, CalArts, and Carnegie-Mellon.  Documentation of his work can be seen at www.thefourthefive.org
 
JENNIE MARYTAI LIU (Co-Creator) was selected amongst 150 emerging dance artists to be presented as part of Dance Theater Workshop’s ‘Fresh Tracks’ 2005, where she showed Bloodwork a fifteen minute trio. The following year, she received a Bessie Schonberg/First Light Commissioning Fund from Dance Theater Workshop to choreograph a piece for their spring season, with which she created Learning in Lower Animals.  She has worked closely with Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar’s Big Dance Theater, developing and performing The Other Here, which premiered at Japan Society in February 2007 and continued to tour internationally and nationally to venues such as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and Yerba Buena Arts Center, SF.  In May 2007, she was one of four out of 200 choreographers to compete in the final round of the ‘Award Show’- a curated competition hosted by the Joyce SoHo.  In December 2007 she presented a full production of Home Birth, at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn, which Gay City News called “hilarious, inspired and original.”  She received a BFA in Theatre from Tisch School Of the Arts, New York University.