“I was 19 when I started at CalArts,” Stoppiello told me during a recent phone conversation. That classroom encounter at CalArts initiated an ongoing examination of the moving body and its relationship to technology that led them from Los Angeles to New York in 1994, where they formed Troika Ranch and developed their creative methodology which “involves a hybrid of three artistic disciplines, dance/theater/media (the Troika), in cooperative artistic interaction (the Ranch).”
Install isadora core software#
They met in 1987 at CalArts when Dawn, who was studying dance, and Mark, who was studying music composition and writing software with Mort Subotnick, were randomly paired as collaborators in a class taught by Cristyne Lawson. Stoppiello and Coniglio are among the first artists whose creative practices developed alongside the digital technology that is now so pervasive, and the story of their ongoing creative partnership is also the story of the past twenty years of performance and digital technology.
The widely used, real-time media manipulation software Isadora, written by Coniglio, was conceptualized and created from the choreographic investigations at the core of their collaboration. Very few artists have been working at the intersection of performance and technology as inquisitively, innovatively and rigorously for as long as choreographer/media-artist Dawn Stoppiello and composer/media-artist Mark Coniglio, known together as Troika Ranch. “16 (R)evolutions” at Staatsoper Stuttgartįorum Neues Musiktheater (Photo credit: A.T.Schaefer)