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"Best Dance Performance of the Year"
SUN POST
The Story of Zero
UP WAKE is a modern day tale foreshadowing our increasingly digital life, following Zero, a toon character, on his way to work not able to distinguish dream from reality.
In UP WAKE, buildings wear suits, Zero deejays dream and reality, tap dances on a giant keyboard, clones himself with a scanner, tames and whips the computer mice, sails away into dreamscape from a single piece of paper and launches into space.
I wanted to create environments that moved and morphed. Like an illusionist, go from one world to another in a second. I wanted to have humor, beauty, simplicity and complexity and use metaphors to suggest ideas. At the beginning of the show, for example, Zero deejays dream and reality. Here are some excerpts:
Created, Produced, Directed, Performed as "Zero" NATASHA TSAKOS Choreography OCTAVIO CAMPOS Sound Design NATHAN RAUSCH Original Music THE LAVOISIER X-PERIENCE 3D Animation RAY ALOY GEORGE DELACADENA MELISSA CAMIC OSCAR BARACALDO & SHATTERED IMAGES ANIMATION STUDIO Lighting Design TRAVIS NEFF Prop design CAROLINA PAGANI Chair designer TATE TENORIO Haute Couture Costume Design TAMMY APOSTOL & GERRY KELLY Green Screen Director AUBREY KESSLER Green Screen Direction of Photography JORGE VALDES IGA Post Production Supervision CAPSULE MEDIA Production Stage Management TRAVIS NEFF
Up Wake /əp/wāk/ (verb): reverse awareness, synthesis of being simultaneously dreaming and conscious.
"As she began to up wake, colors smelled differently and sounds looked brighter"
"A Masterpiece"
NEW TIMES
UP WAKE lasts 52 minutes and 54 seconds. I project 3D animation on all four surfaces of the stage which I interact with. The use of animation and projection was a process of discovery. I didn't use it as a special effect, but as a partner on stage. There are no special effects in UP WAKE, no artifice. It's as lavish and intricate as it is simple and minimal.
Three hundred and forty-four frames, four and a half years and commissions later, what started as a one person show became a collaborative work of nineteen most talented artists.
"Phenomenal Success"
MIAMI LIVING MAGAZINE
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Featured on
UP WAKE transports its audience into a world of exhilaration and visual poetry. A bare stage and an actor. The rest is purely suggested and synchronized to sound effects, Computer Generated Images (CGI) and an exhilarating soundtrack. Within this space of total possibility, Natasha muses on the deepest questions of the human soul.
UP WAKE was commissioned by Miami Light Project and Miami Performing Arts Center (2003-2007) and inaugurated the grand opening of the Adrienne Arsht Center (2007), the second largest Performing Arts Center in the US, with sold out performances. Described as “A perfect jewel of a performance" by the New Times, and nominated “Best Dance Performance of the Year” by the SunPost, UP WAKE toured within the US and Mexico (2007-2008), garnered the attention of local and national press, and lead to an invitation to the TED stage in Long Beach, California (2009). The same year, Florida International Magazine presented Natasha Tsakos with a “South Florida's 100 Power Players” Award.
"The Next Big Thing"
MIAMI HERALD
"A perfect Jewel of a performance."
NEW TIMES
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