The film comes straight via the invaluable Snarkmarket. It looks like something out of film class, but the video itself is undoctored: The dance is shot as it appeared to the audience, without cuts or angle changes. But as the audience’s excitement makes clear, it came off the stage as it comes off the screen here: as something that’s not just dance, but dance plus something else —  something the dance itself created. And that something is film, essentially; they’ve used  TRON-inspired suits and some very slick lighting choreography to create effects that would never have been conceived outside of filmic history and language. Beautiful, startling stuff.

As Robin Sloan puts it at Snarkmarket:

It’s ostensibly TRON-themed, but that’s irrelevant to its coolness.

What makes it so great is the way that it puts the techniques of video editing—freeze frames, jump cuts, motion trails—back up on stage, live. (And of course now we’re watching it on video again. I love the flip-flop: from digital to analog to digital to analog to…)

You actually see a lot of this in dance these days. To me, popping and locking and the stuttering, slow-mo dance moves on display (e.g.) here are basically inconceivable without video. We need to see human bodies moving this way on screens before we can imagine moving them that way out on the street.

Via Michael Donohoe.