Introduction
Wisse Scheele is a passionate professional dancer. When he was ten years old, he joined the national ballet academy in Amsterdam, from which he graduated nine years later. Today, he dances with the Ballet of the Slovak National Theatre. Besides ballet, he is also passionate about painting, photography and video. He is particularly drawn to new digital forms of expression, which allow him to rethink traditional dance in three-dimensional space, for instance by transforming his own choreographed dances into moving virtual objects whose diverse forms and swirling atmosphere surprise the viewer while literally revolutionising the old ideas of triadic ballet.
Scheele creates his works using a motion capture suit that records his complex dance movements and translates them into data, which he processes and shapes using digital tools. His suspenseful and visually exalted objects and dancing beings made of light feel as if they have sprung from the realm of fantasy, fascinatingly swirling, gliding, jumping and floating across the image. With his changing forms, Scheele tears down the boundaries of traditional dance and translates the beauty of movement far beyond the physical realm of space into abstraction. Everything becomes danceable, and there is essentially nothing that does not perform an impressive dance all on its own.
In each of his Figures of Light, two ephemeral, distorted bundles of light swirl in diverse colours and translucent states across a black stage to produce a wide range of forms. Their placement in space produces a sense of depth, with the two figures seeming to communicate through dance: whether animated, well-tempered or joyfully excited, whether monologic or dream-haunted and self-explanatory, any interpretation is up to the amazed viewers themselves. In any case, these wonderful, formally beautiful light-beings bring up numerous associations. They could be so many things; in fact, it is thanks to the diverse range of imaginable possibilities that the mystery of the fantastical takes concrete form. Dance and movement become a new language, a form of expression, a way of life.
Stephan Reisner
