Transmission in Motion

The Technologizing of Dance

Maaike Bleeker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315524153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

How can various technologies, from the more conventional to the very new, be used to archive, share and understand dance movement? How can they become part of new ways of creating dance? What does this tell us about the ways in which technology is part of how we make sense and think?

Well-known choreographers and dance collectives including William Forsythe, Siohban Davis, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and BADco. have initiated projects to investigate these questions, and in so doing have inaugurated a new era for dance archives, education, research and creation. Their work draws attention to the intimate relationship between the technologies we use and the ways in which we think, perceive, and make sense.

Transmission in Motion examines these extraordinary projects 'from the inside', presenting in-depth analyses by the practitioners, artists and collectives involved in their development. These studies are framed by scholarly reflection, illuminating the significance of these projects in the context of current debates on dance, the (multi-media) archive, immaterial cultural heritage and copyright, embodied cognition, education, media culture and the knowledge society.

PART I

1

MOVEMENTS ACROSS MEDIA

Twelve tools for transmission

Maaike Bleeker and Scott deLahunta

The twelve individual projects represented in this first part of Transmission in Motion each in their own way engage with something that may be called dance knowledge. Yet what kind of knowledge this is and how the transmission of such knowledge is mediated, stimulated, or redirected, varies considerably per project. A project might be based entirely on the work of an individual choreographer (like William Forsythe in Improvisation Technologies and Synchronous Objects, Steve Paxton in Material for the Spine, Merce Cunningham in Loops, Emio Greco | PC in Double Skin/Double Mind, Siobhan Davies in Replay, or Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in A Choreographer’s Score) or be conceived of as a platform for more than one choreographer (Motion Bank), or a project may be more broadly related to the history and development of dance (Digital Dance Archives), or to networking across the dance community (the Dance-tech project). Some projects aim to transmit knowledge embedded within movement practices (Improvisation Technologies, Material for the Spine, Double Skin/Double Mind), others within choreographies (Replay, Motion Bank, Loops), dance knowledge as constituted in archives or community networks (Digital Dance Archives, the Dance-tech project), or within modes of creating (Replay, A Choreographer’s Score). Many of them aim to actively contribute to making dance, by offering insight in movement practices (Improvisation Technologies, Material for the Spine, Double Skin/Double Mind), tools for creating choreographies (Whatever Dance Toolbox, Choreographic Language Agent), or a platform for exchanging “movement arts” research (the Dance-tech project). Many of the projects also, implicitly or explicitly, raise questions about how dance can be known, how such knowledge can be transmitted, and more broadly, what knowledge is, what dance can tell us about the relation between knowledge and movement, and about the potential of various media technologies in the transmission of knowledge. While each individual project and its stated aims, both implicit and explicit, offers diverse perspectives on these questions, the goal of this volume is also to enable questions from other perspectives (in Part II) to be asked, not always explicitly about dance knowledge, but knowledge more generally, relations between movement and meaning, and the potential of various media technologies to transmit knowledge. The goal of this chapter is to offer a comparative overview of the twelve individual projects in Part I, and some points of connection with the other chapters in Part II.

The intrinsic diversity across the projects is reflected in the different writing styles of the authors and their different approaches to introducing their projects. Although points of connection can be observed (in terms of aims and goals, challenges, collaborators) each of these projects developed in its own unique way. Nevertheless, some recurring tendencies can be observed as well, points of connection between the motivations and needs of each project, and what was encountered in the process toward outcomes, both planned and unforeseen. The goal of this chapter is to provide observations that may support grasping the specificity of each individual project as well as points of connection between them. And also, to support grasping connections not only across the separate projects, but also in relation to the chapters in the second part of this volume. It is important to note that what the chapters in this first part offer is not the projects themselves (all are accessible via their own form of publication), but stories of how they came to be, what was discovered in the process, and reflections on what that has brought. Our discussion in the pages that follow contains many references to these stories which are told in the next twelve chapters. All page numbers mentioned refer to pages elsewhere in this volume.

Motivations and needs

A closer look at what motivated the development of these projects reveals that in most cases they were motivated by very concrete needs in combination with the perceived potential of a particular medium to fulfill these needs. Chris Ziegler describes how what would become the CD-ROM William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies developed out of the need to circulate recordings of performances of Forsythe’s creations among the dancers. Because Forsythe never stopped changing his creations, after its premiere every performance was documented on video. This video archive helped new members of the company learn movements of past productions. To allow them to better prepare for rehearsals, the company handed out portable video players to dancers so they could learn the movements from home. Constant play and rewind of these analog videos caused wear and tear on the tapes. Digitalization promised a more sustainable approach. Eventually the video-documentation trajectory resulted in the annotation tool called Piecemaker, a software that assists in scoring video recordings of dance and sharing this information with others developed by David Kern (see also page 43). What would become the Improvisation Technologies CD-ROM with 65 small lectures from Forsythe and demonstrations from dancers became its own trajectory.

Many other projects as well were motivated by a need for ways to capture and transmit dance knowledge that threatened to get lost when, for example, particular works would no longer be performed, or could no longer be performed the way they had been performed, or makers would cease to be active. Paul Kaiser describes how one of the motivations for Loops was “to convey Merce’s intricate timing when he was no longer able to perform it” (22). Bojana Cvejic´ explains how the idea for the scores was triggered by De Keersmaeker’s observations that this would probably be the last time she would be performing these works herself, and the observed importance of a retrospective exploration of De Keersmaeker’s legacy. Sarah Whatley describes how as a researcher, she became increasingly aware of the difficulties of accessing records of dance in performance. The development of Siobhan Davies Replay responded to the need to make the oeuvre of this choreographer and more broadly, the history of contemporary British dance, as well as Davies’ role in shaping that history, accessible and visible.

In several projects the aim was not (or not only) to transmit knowledge about particular creations but (also) about modes of working and creating. Siobhan Davies Replay not only offers access to recordings of past performances, but also insights into materials that inspired creation and into how dance is formed. For Emio Greco | PC, interactive technology held the promise of the possibility of a virtual version of a workshop with which dancers can familiarize themselves with the specificities of Emio Greco | PC’s movement language. Steve Paxton’s many years of research he called “material for the spine” aimed to create “a strong technical approach to the processes of improvisation” characteristic of Paxton’s Contact Improvisation (32). And although the first phase of the development of Improvisation Technologies focused on transmitting knowledge about one specific creation (Self Meant to Govern), in a later stage the aim shifted towards the creation of a “digital dance school” that would introduce Forsythe’s ideas for creating movement material. BADco. and Wayne McGregor, recognizing the potential of technological agents to extend their choreographic methods, set out to develop technological aids to enhance their creative processes.

In most cases, the reasons for embarking on these projects include the desire for new and different ways of sharing dance knowledge, critically, creatively, and disruptively. Cvejic´ explains that the reasons for her to design a “choreographic score” stemmed from her discontent with dance education “privileging the technical import of what it means to dance a bodily movement cut from the historical, contextual and poietical aspects integral to the actual dance form and technique” (53). The scores are meant as “tools to emulate the choreographic thought” rather than showing them what to imitate (53). The development of Replay seeks to afford active ways of engaging with the materials available by means of, among others, virtual scrapbooks, which allow users to collect and reflect on their searches. Similarly the Digital Dance Archives aim to enhance user interaction. The project was designed to encourage students and artists to create their own “scrapbooks” of images as a research repository arranged into folders, displayed, tagged, annotated, stored, and shared (74). Motion Bank wants to be an interdisciplinary research environment for dance, a broad context for research into choreographic practice, but is also focused on the development of digital documentation and design to record and share aspects of dance. The Dance-tech project is meant as a tactical media project that intervenes in the knowledge distribution systems of contemporary performance and their contexts by means of a networked environment that is open for sharing, telling, and retelling.

For many projects, the motivation to create them included the desire to communicate with a broader community of peers as well as the desire to reach out to new contexts, beyond dance. Cvejic´ observes an urge “to reflect on their methods and tools and share them with a larger readership outside the discipline,” and the importance of claiming a different status and position for dance (53). The aim to bring new viewers to dance who might discover dance by searching for other artists, compositions, and literary sources informed the construction of Siobhan Davies Replay from the very beginning. The Synchronous Objects project also had the ambition from the outset to attract as diverse an audience as possible on the basis that the content in dance can be made accessible to experts outside the field of dance whose areas of interest intersect with dance not as art or performance perhaps, but as complex organizational structures and interaction patterns that are objects of study for other fields. Making choreographic ideas and processes available for study by other research domains was one of the aims of Motion Bank from its very beginning.

Process and development

The process phase of each project is where motivations and ideas had to be turned into concrete practices to develop that which the project aimed to create. In many cases this involved working along two lines of research and inventing ways of bringing these together: on the one hand, the material that the aimed-for tool or platform was intended to transmit (modes of working of choreographers or companies, knowledge embedded in or about specific creations, or more broadly, knowledge of and about dance) and, on the other hand, the technological possibilities available to do so. For example, developing the Digital Dance Archives required on the one hand developing insight in the materials that were made to be accessible by the archives and on the other hand insight into metadata schemes and in how website design would function across different search engines. In addition, the Digital Dance Archives experimented with more analytic problems, such as how a non-linear cultural history might be meaningfully exposed through a new “visual search” method that allows the visitor to look for similar movements or poses in the material across different dance styles and periods. Cvejic´ describes how making De Keersmaeker’s choreographic knowledge accessible meant first of all externalizing this knowledge, which involved extensive preliminary research and two phases of interviews. The next step was reconstituting choreography in writing, and combining this writing with synthetic schemes, diagrams, and drawings, annotated by the choreographer, photos from the performances and rehearsals, and additional photography made for the purpose of illustrating the verbal explanation in concrete detail, program notes, reviews, notes from De Keersmaeker’s notebooks, and letters. Sh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Transmission in Motion
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index