PERFECT SURF

 

Perfect Surf, a collaboration between video artist Jenny Rogers and choreographer Clove Galilee, features some of the world’s top champion "tunnel divers" in the world’s largest wind tunnel.  Furthering her exploration of dance immersed in the elements, Ms. Rogers utilizes the medium of air to explore the relationship of the body in flight, filming the tunnel divers in freefalls, riding the waves of air like surfers on the open ocean.  An homage to the classic surf films of the 1960’s, Perfect Surf recasts “The Endless Summer” as an eleven minute dance film where 60’s surf bums have now become new millennium sky surfers. 

Perfect Surf is dance on an epic scale.  Set inside the world’s largest wind tunnel, the film takes as its jumping off point the sport of bodyflight.  Originally constructed in the 1940’s & 1950’s by Defense Departments around the world, vertical wind tunnels were built to study aircraft and missile tolerances in extreme aerodynamic conditions. Today, these abandoned research facilities have seen new life as modern recreation centers.  Repurposed as amusement parks,  humans have rediscovered the wind tunnel, and in so doing, realized a primal desire—to fly.

Utilized most recently by professional skydivers as a vital training tool, the vertical wind tunnel has now born a sport all its own.  Bodyflight or tunnel diving, as it’s known, allows athletes, many of whom are former Olympic skydivers, surfers and skiers, to compete under a completely different set of circumstances. The controlled environment inside the tube space, filled by airflow of 4000 horsepower, can be calibrated to work with the height and weight of each individual flyer, allowing the individual to freefly indefinitely.  A skydive that once averaged 30 seconds now can be 30 minutes in duration.

Perfect Surf takes bodyflight to a new level, aestheticizing the dance on air.  Introducing music as a choreographic element for the first time, the athletes take flight-- featuring solo, duet & group flights like Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, the famous duets of Fred Astaire & Gingers Rogers & the large-scale synchronized spectacles of Busby Berkeley.