Morinville Cultural Centre presents an illuminating dance

Lights! Action! That’s the perceived order of things to kickstart a play – that is unless you happen to be Rainbow Dance Theatre.

The Oregon-based company uses a black light theatre technique and attaches electro-luminescent wire and fibre optic fabric to their dancers to create a variety of special effects.

“The special effects on the dancers are driven by battery packs. It depends what circuits are turned on and off by computer and that’s the image you see. The computer has 98 different tracks of imaging,” says Valerie Bergman, cofounder of Rainbow Dance Theatre.

Blending masterful dancing and cutting-edge light technology, they have created iLumiDance, an animated world of magical puppet creatures immersed in an undersea world.

They float, swim and dance in inky waters while mysterious land animals and a sorceress appear. Following her lead, humanoids in light suits dance through a series of highly-charged West African drum rhythms.

Humans later morph into animals with a background of tangos, classical and modern music motifs and nothing remains substantial for any length of time.

Rather than providing a narrative, there is a suggestive storyline starting with the Big Bang explosion that creates a single cell before evolving into sea creatures, apes and finally mankind.

Rainbow Dance Theatre debuts the 55-minute fantasy world at Morinville Community Centre on March 10 at 7:30 p.m. A limited number of free tickets are available one hour before show time.

Bergman, a post-modern dancer-choreographer for Merce Cunningham, and her husband Darryl Thomas, a collaborator in the world-renowned Pilobolus Dance Theatre first met at the University of Hawaii more than 20 years ago.

Combining Thomas’ acrobatic partnering from Pilobolus and Bergman’s more classically based ballet training, the duo experimented with new dances.

“We got more and more taken with visual elements and as technology developed we looked around to see what was new and what we could use,” Bergman.

The nine-dancer company is now on seven-stop Canadian tour followed by a second British Columbia tour in April.

“Yeah, we’ve been stretched a lot. But it takes us places we never thought we’d go.”