Weightless Rhythmic Skating is a dance form that can only be fully observed if the audience travels with it. Through Traffic, Shannon takes the audience with him in this voyage of dance.
Weightless Rhythmic Skating combines the stylistic funk and flow of 1970's rollerdisco with footwork patterns performed in a rhythmic fashion on the surface of the skateboard to music. The overall appearance of the skating is closer to a cross-country skier than a skateboarder due to Shannon's use of modified "rocker-bottom" crutches to de-weight out of his hips and into his arms. The unique combination of the use of the crutches with the skateboard enables Shannon to seemingly float on top of the board and dance out steps impossible in the traditional use of a skateboard.
The audience for Traffic rides on a chartered tour bus observing the performance through one-way windows that pedestrians can’t see through. The bus travels through city streets on a predetermined path. Shannon performs both transient-specific choreography around the traveling bus and site-specific choreography at prearranged stops.
The relationship of the audience to the work from a moving tour bus will be created as Shannon paces the bus and the bus in turn paces him. The traveling relationship is fully realized as the bus intermittently pulls over for an arranged observation of a site-specific performance sequence before traveling onward with Shannon to yet another location.
The transient choreography of Traffic features Shannon’s invented form of rhythmic skateboarding. The site-specific choreography features the artist’s invented form of Shannon Technique for dance on crutches. Themes of the choreography for Traffic include radical relationships to urban architecture and the skater ethos.
A multimedia real-time connection between the artist and the audience on the bus will be maintained throughout the entirety of the performance event. Cameras mounted on the bus feature live feeds to monitors in the bus, allowing the audience to see Shannon at all times, no matter which side of the bus he is performing on. Music from Shannon’s headphones will be sent wirelessly to the bus allowing the audience to witness his notion of expressing rhythm and melody, on a skateboard, over the span of blocks.
The ultimate goal of Traffic is to share with live audiences the vibrancy of musical skateboarding over a landscape as it happens and allow the audience to experience the intensity of the dances’ relationship to street elements as interpreted through the skater ethos.
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