"The Ankle-Diver," a fantastical love story combining the organic world of Japanese Noh theatre with the highly technological world of multimedia production, will be presented Friday-Sunday, Dec. 15-17, at the School of Drama's New Theater at 1156 Chapel St.

A multimedia piece for two performers, one multimedia director and three large video screens, the project addresses the territory between theater and dance, poetry and prose, computer-controlled music and live performance. The work was composed by Matthew Suttor, visiting lecturer in music composition, and written by Tim Acito, a student in the School of Drama's playwriting program.

"The Ankle-Diver" is funded by a Special Projects Grant from Yale's Digital Media Center for the Arts (DMCA), which was established in 1998 to foster innovative technological initiatives in the arts. "'The Ankle-Diver' was chosen," says Carol Scully, director of the DMCA, "because it promotes cross-disciplinary interaction, discovery and creation. It also will further the development of interactive performance curriculum at the University and will establish collaborative relationships with other peer institutions."

The performance explores many of the ways new technology can be used in a live theatrical context. In certain sections of the piece, the performers will be filmed live so that their images can be simultaneously mixed with pre-recorded, digitally-edited video footage. Similarly, live music will be integrated with a computer-generated score.

"Music is something I always see," says Suttor, "so it's natural for me to compose with theatrical images in mind. The music and video have been assembled in a similar fashion. We take a simple video image from the natural world (such as water, the moon, the human form and a bucket of oranges) and manipulate it with computer technology to produce a wide spectrum of layered images. Most of the score has been composed from digital samples of a wood flute, a wine glass and a spaghetti pot." These digital samples are then analyzed using special computer software and transformed into musical scales.

Suttor came to the United States from New Zealand in 1992 on a Fulbright Scholarship and in 1999 received his Doctorate of Musical Arts from Columbia University. Recent projects include an hour-long taped piece for Pina Bausch II that toured through Germany, and a one-man interactive multimedia piece, "Sarrasine," performed to critical acclaim in New York.

Acito, who will also be one of the two performers in "The Ankle-Diver," toured internationally as a professional modern dancer for six years before coming to Yale in the fall of 1999. His works for dance-theater have been seen throughout the United States and abroad.

"I'm part formalist and part post-modern romantic," says Acito. "'The Ankle-Diver' has been the perfect opportunity to try to create stunning visual images and connect them with enough narrative structure to appeal to both the mind and the senses."

Performances of "The Ankle-Diver" will be at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $12 for general admission, $7 for students and seniors; they can be purchased at the door. Reservations are recommended. For reservations or for more information, call (203) 432-4667.

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