Profesora Adjunta en la Universidad Federal
de Bahía, Programa de Postgrado en Danza, Líder del
Grupo de Investigación en Ciberdanza, Coordinadora científica
del Laboratorio de Investigaciones Avanzadas del
Cuerpo, Salvador, Bahía, Brasil
We are interested here in highlighting relevant aspects and innovations of some studies that describe the choreographic implications in interactive art based on movement, as well as some experimental and theoretical references proposed by women who had a pioneering role in the History of Dance.
We are interested to describe, analyze and propose to dance a new concept: the
concept of Interactive Digital Choreography. So our focus is on the digital
choreographic possibilities with interactive quality, and contributions and
new ideas proposed by women who participated in the recent history of Interactive
Dance. It rather is an attempt to write the history of dance in interface with
new technologies, highlighting those contributions often not revealed in official
written, and generally male, history of dance.
Let's start some concepts and components that help us understand more deeply
the Interactive Digital Choreography. The Interactive Digital Choreography explored
in this work shares some features with Interactive Art. We consider that the
concept of Interactive Art comes from a continuation of the artistic movement
advent of interactive installations that arise with the first facilities of
videos installations that team together with happenings and conceptual art;
all of them are part of the artistic movement of the 60s.
The first woman who stands out for her contributions and research on our topic
is Gretchen Schiller of Brunel University (England). Schiller proposes that
"the practice of dance and improvisation, contact improvisation, happenings,
social dances, games using motion, or martial arts such as capoeira Angola have
characteristics that are interrelated with the definitions on art interactive.
As the interactive art, these forms of dance require participation; they connect
the body through immersive movement and interactive environments, a place that
dancers can feel internally processed within the context of improvisation. This
context generates new choreography and performances by feedback" . Schiller
thus builds the argument that interactive art based on the movement is a form
of Interactive Art. The difference between interactive art based on the movement
and interactive art itself is a subtitle.
Schiller’s specialization is important for the proposition that interactive
art differentiate of interactive art based on movement because it includes both
the practice of physical movement, as well mediadance and choreographic attention
to participate in the interacting dynamics of the movement. We are proposing,
following Schiller, that Interactive Digital Choreography is one option or a
category of Interactive Art based on the movement.
Each of these experiences, and creations developed by choreographers with their
software, offer different notions of what is the conception of motion, the proposal
of interactivity, or even ideas of what is an interactive choreographic system.
Schiller believes that the team with interactive art based on the movement has
a kinetic predecessor arts dating from the early twentieth century with the
Realist Manifesto. We could not fail to mention the kinetic arts when we are
proposing a study on the art of movement, on dance. The choreographers, which
are accentuated in the complexities of body movement, are developing practices,
artifacts, software, and theoretical production that contribute to the repertory
of researches related to the art of choreography, with the Interactive Digital
Choreography.
We consider, according to Schiller, at an early stage artists expand the concept
of body, through the materials and technologies, as a precedent for Interactive
Art based on the movement. Sure there are many examples of dance choreography
in which technologies were used, not just digital, transcending biological limitations
of the body, such as the introduction of pointed shoes in 1832 in the ballet
"La Sylphide", but it was with the artifacts created by Loie Fuller
in the late nineteenth century, artifacts used to multiply her body in multiple
images, or even convert it into animated shapes of flowers, orchids and streamers,
either through a sophisticated game of mirrors, either through a very complex
system of lighting and special suits, named as under-lighting system, which
created and patented, that Fuller added a new and revolutionary conception of
dance.
Loie Fuller is regarded by us as a first dance matriarch in interface with new
technologies, as well as being innovative in her proposal the dancing body as
a body-image, and no more than strengthening the body as a mere player movements,
she reconfigures the role of being a woman and artist in the late nineteenth
century: she was producing her own performances and also other artists works
like Isadora Duncan, she also had activities as theater director, multimedia
artist and researcher of the art, taking on roles previously filled just by
men.
The contributions of Fuller's where is the beginning point for all of us who
work contemporary with dance and technology, not considering it would be a mistake
due to ignorance, and we can say that in the history of dance the event that
there are not many historical records of her person just shows male and official
state of dance writing until the twentieth century, always emphasizing again
the life and works of great choreographers and dancers. Fuller's contribution
is a big paradigm shift to dance, to propose dance as a visual art and not just
an art of movement, but historians do not realize even yet.
Following Schiller, in her thesis she illustrates how the body moves through,
pierces the material, thus transforming the body into a composition of many
other materials and dynamic means, reconfiguring its own. That is why it is
important to also record the relationship of dance and videographic and film
production.
Schiller builds an important historical retrospective considering the categories
of dance and film proposed by director Allegra Fuller Snyder, to develop a historical
review of technologically mediated art works and the different stages of the
relationship between dance and technology.
So we have in the 60s Snyder proposing three distinct categories of dance and
film. One would be the simple recording of a dance, where with just one camera,
and also just a unique point of view, the dance danced on stage was recorded,
another is the documentary film category of dance, where the narrative is respected
but dance is adapted to film by using the camera close-ups, made distinct, and
other technical capabilities, and more cameras available, and finally the cinedance,
or "choreocinema" (a term proposed by John Martin), that is the creation
of a new art, which can transcend the biological potential of our gravitational
body and where it was introduced, according to Snyder, new possibilities of
the body. Last category is the one most closely related to the topic of this
work and in the emerging Interactive Digital Choreography alternative ways of
moving bodies, new body shapes.
Snyder believes that film and video dance invite and bring the audience closer
kinesthetic, that is, to within the transforming experience of dance, as opposed
to the earlier act of dance or just go see the movement. Snyder believes that
the camera and editing introducing alternative forms of sensation kinesthetic
of "space, size, depth, no-gravity, time, movement, and expansion of a
new logic, rhythm and reality" . The cinedance and experimental and popular
films, invite the audience to start to see more kinesthetic action recorded,
and invite the body audience to move kinesthetically and internally through
various movement qualities and locations.
Cinedance is also a possibility to show different and intimate views of the
body that were impossible for the "frontal view dance”, traditionally
seen on Italian stage. For Snyder, though the audience is fixed in their places
to attend, cinedance offers the chance to dance internally or kinesthetic "feel
and move" to and through space and time, linking dynamic spaces and fictitious
states on the screen.
We propose that the possibility of Interactive Digital Choreography is a historical
flow, after the experiences of choreographers with the language of cinema and
video. It was this previous load testing on the visual arts, film and video,
that facilitates the way, since the 90s of the twentieth century, to interactive
choreographic art development.
Based on Snyder’s previous studies and experiences, Schiller in her thesis
proposes three categories which differ from the ways in which body movement
is translated or transposed to material forms, through technologically mediated
processes. These categories are not totalizing but are presented as tools to
aid in understanding the ways in which the movement of the body becomes disrupted,
thus offering new possibilities for body and how was it built this closer relationship
between the language of dance and technology.
With the Schiller’s categories of corporal knowledge, the movement crosses
and transposes itself artistically in other materials. That puts the interactive
art based on the movement thematically within a historical context and interdisciplinary,
not just as a response to the dance and technology community of 80, resulting
from the widespread popularity of computers. We believe that the possibility
of the Interactive Digital Choreography is very productive to propose and experiment
with "new bodies, bodies built through interactive software.
The categories proposed by Schiller were initially used to describe visual art
forms, are they: Trans-figuring describes artwork where the figure of human
body ranges from being visually recognized or not, Trans-forming describes works
in which the human figure is close be recognized, yet it is through its abstraction,
and kinesthetic sensory being perceived and Trans-planting characterized works
of art which are based on characteristics of body movement as bodies not recognized
or not necessarily perceived as kinesthetic form. These categories basically
describe visual art forms, and we need to understand that we are appropriating
Schiller’s categories to support the Interactive Digital Choreography
is also a form of visual arts.
Let us begin to think more specifically about the characteristics of the Interactive
Digital Choreography, recapturing some historical and conceptual points. Historically,
we have to consider interactivity as an aesthetic category that did not derive
from the classical concepts of composition or choreography, and it was always
related to the avant-gardes productions of the twentieth century and its performative
experiments, such as Dada, Futurism the surreal performances, and there was
interactivity as a conceptual tool for the activation and provocation of the
public.
To understand the Interactivity of contemporary events we need to understand
the events that happened in the history of art in the 60s, with Fluxus, process
art, situations, kinetic art, conceptual art, art and technology. We need to
understand the collaboration of the work of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg,
cyber art, installation of closed circuit video and others, and of course the
progressive "dematerialization of the art object", which involves
the active and physical public PARTICIPATION in the event.
Since the 70s, the interactivity in art generally refers to multimedia installations
and experiments that involve electronic interfaces or assisted by computers.
In the 70s, interfaces are characterized not only by their contact points and
interaction between the machine and the physical, or the information of the
experiment, but also by the artistic strategies used to wrap the audience inside
the artistic dialogue.
Comparing with interactive installations and digital art works, sound sculptures,
immersive experiments, computer games and more recently Internet-based forms
of telepresence, the INTERACTIVE DANCE, in a more restricted survey of designated
assisted art computers, can not revindicate to itself as long and heterogeneous
history.
At one time, the dance creators are widely performed dance work in multimedia
scenarios, sophisticated structured for consumption and aesthetic contemplation
of the audience. Dance installations and online interactive dance, which activate
the participation of the users, are rare events that require special attention
and analysis, especially since we do not have established aesthetic or social
criteria for an evaluation of this interface.
According to Professor Johannes Birringer (Brunel University, England) in the
area of interactive performance, and we would add interactive dance performance,
we consider the term "Interactivity" for us to refer to two phenomena.
First, the "Interaction" as a spatial and architectural concept for
the performance, and also the word "interactivity" in a census more
closely to collaborative performance CONTROL SYSTEMS (cybernetic systems) in
which the movements of the performer, gesture and action, are captured by the
cameras and sensors and used as input to activate or control properties of other
components such as videos, sounds, MIDI, text, graphics, QuickTime movies, scanned
images, etc. An "Interactive System" would be a system that allows
the performer to generate, synthesize and process images, sounds, voices and
text sharing and proposing a real-time event.
To propose "Interaction" as a concept and architectural space for
performance, means doing an exercise to remove the focus we have in the dance,
as to the creation of steps, phrases and choreographic combinations, or even
from the stimulus to create dances from "points" of the body, removing
the focus of consciousness inside the body, contemporary stimulated by certain
practices such as yoga and other techniques for bringing not just a space, but
more broadly exercise dance as an relational architecture where space influenced
dance, and dance can create forms, and created forms in space change again the
dance, in a feedback process.
To emphasize attention to the contact, weight, and in the transferred energy
when a couple dance, as practiced in contact improvisation, is a good preparation
for later work with the physically motivated sensor interfaces, especially sensors
that can be coupled to body. This re-orientation in space also means the initial
knowledge of how the lights can sculpt the space, or as the color of light,
angle, temperature and intensity are constituents of the spatial dynamics and
mediate the plasticity of space that creates and opportunities for movement.
For bodies that move and change lights in space, bring more an awareness of
how the body resonates in a space that echoes, they are part of the collective
consciousness in which we are involved, in which where we are invited to become
co-creators and participants of the work. This notion of a resonant space involvement
presents itself in the plastic and sculptured processes that dancers, visual
artists, media artists, programmers and architects are exploring recently is
a process of drawing in the "smooth space" that allows the integration
of a "nervous" or "significant" presence of the media.
For Birringer the sculptural process emerging in this contemporary dance and
new interface technologies can be analyzed as a change in the line proposed
by the concept of space of Rudolf Laban, and in the principles of kinesthetic
abstract constructivism of the Bauhaus, in addition to the ideas of social sculpture
of Joseph Beuys and Hélio Oiticica. What Birringer suggests is that with
this construction and architectural space we have the possibility to envision
a non-Western and non-Euclidean way of analyzing space science and geometry.
We believe that in this new interactive architecture for the dance we have a
new philosophical condition that enables us to be harmoniously within the contextual
space that we live, in which we are immersed and which are inseparable of our
bodies. In short, a performative relational architecture that invites participation,
and that did not exclude virtual architectures, on the contrary, the dance and
changes in the notions of a specific place in interactive installations need
to be discussed including virtual reality, immersion models comprising fiscal
and synthetically, the 3-D simulators, to recognize the connections between
design based on spatial representation and designs generated by algorithms.
Recent studies unwrapped in computer science, artificial life programming and
3-D (VRML) suggests hybrid combinations unimagined and studies for the performance
of which has a considerable impact on collaborations between choreographers,
composers and designs interested in complex, imaginative and dynamic "improvisation
technologies".
In a possible expanded architecture, the performers can do physical and tactile
experience lies related to virtual reality, in which they can modify and transform
the space, moving through the projective world generated by computers, that
means that the performer moves through waves, fields of color and pulse, sailing
between virtual objects, so the body can experience potentially a kinetic rupture
caused for our visual senses, expanding the surface of our physical body and
getting an extension on its sense of touch. It is also dissolved the traditional
division between performer and audience, building an interactive performative
space together.
In the spatial structure, where the interactivity above changes the perception
of many practitioners of dance, used to work in real spaces defined, and a proscenium
position within the stage space, or forward to a passive audience sitting in
their chairs, for a realization that breaks that sweep between performer and
audience, and requested the choreographers new vocabularies, vocabularies consist
of interactive designs and VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), notions
such as parameters, mapping, navigation, collection systems, tracking , MIDI
(Musical Instrument Digital Interface), genetic algorithms, specific languages
such as MAX/MSP.
Moreover, the use of these new technologies in dance, for Interactive Digital
choreography creation, we need the minimum requirement of basic understanding
of computational processes, which are generally invisible. And it creates contemporary
concepts derived from "emerging" science or as self-generators systems.
In dance, you can already see very significant events regarding the use of new
technologies. One of our works, fig.1 and 2, within the collective i-Arch bodies
(interactive architectures of bodies), using the Isadora software, developed
by Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello (Nova York) and free Processing software,
we construct a piece for generating from a dance human body various other bodies,
and build an special architecture so that every movement causing delays and
these delays get a scale of RGB color on red, green, blue, as you can see in
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOjGYvrrr28 .
Further highlighting the importance of women in Dance History and Technology
we consider that in addition to Loie Fuller, Allegra Snyder, in the beginning
of 80s (twentieth century) a group of graphical interfaces researchers at the
University of Simon Fraser (Canada), led by Thecla Schphorst, a graphic designer
who had already danced professionally, developed the software "Lifeforms",
software that lets you create the choreography in a virtual platform where you
can watch the choreography of several earlier points impossible, as above, to
the right, behind, and others. The most significant potential offered by the
"Lifeforms" is that you can see the choreography in a more lively
and not static, as when delineated on paper by choreographers.
It was a woman who developed the software "Lifeforms" with her team,
but it was much more famous the choreographer who developed the first work with
the "Lifeforms", the north American choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Would be there a mistake of the male official story of dance that always appoints
Cunningham and “Lifeforms” associating, forgetting its creator Thecla
Schphorst? We cannot fail to record that for decades and decades the choreographers
were mostly men, and therefore women dancers performed their ideas, and of course
did not receive payment in the same values. It also happened with the written
and official History of Dance, which for decades had only male writers such
as Paul Boucier, Roger Garaudy, and Antonio Faro.
Cunningham worked for many years with the “Lifeforms” software in
their study of dance in New York. After Cunningham many other choreographers
to benefit from the use of the "Lifeforms", I myself come to using
the same facilities in video dances, fig.3, and/or dance scenes where the animation
made by digital bodies interact with "real" human dancers. A growing
number of international choreographers and performers began to experiment with
the computer together dance and new digital technologies. This event cannot
be seen as a surprise because since the 80s of the twentieth century the dance
has been having its supports as film or video.
However, we can reflect on this fact. If Cunningham was as a worldwide reference
for the pioneering use of software "Lifeforms" applied to their choreographic
creations, we would like to give credit to the great importance to us the figure
of the creator of the software "Lifeforms", Thecla Schphorst. Of course,
after "Lifeforms" came a whole family of editing softwares and softwares
created specifically for interactive performance, to include the "Isadora"
developer by Troika Ranch Dance Theater Group (U.S.A.), the "Eyecon"
software developed by Palindrome Inter.media Performance Group (Germany) among
others. So we declare Schphorst as well as a matriarch in the fields of dance
and new technologies.
We still can not forget the first experiments in this area of dance and technologies
that are certainly films made by Maya Deren in the 40s, and studies on the chronomovement
photography and cinema made by Muybridge, Marey and Mèliés, all
of them need to be considered in the historic route of digital animations systems
called “motion capture”. In addition, choreographers, researchers
and teachers used for some time the cinema and video as an important tool to
analyze documents or existing works.
Some software such as "LabanWriter" and "Lifeforms" have
been used in the area of dance notation and preservation of dance history, and
with the advent of these softwares we can also demonstrate the new possibility
to use the computer for the invention and display of new possibilities of movement.
It should be noted the great contribution of Maya Deren to dance, because we
believe that the concept of body moving in space/time presented in her film
language is like an initial framework of contemporary video dance productions,
and subsequently the research in the field of interactive dance. If Loie Fuller
(in the late nineteenth century) is like a first matriarch in this path of women
in technology in dance, Maya Deren (early twentieth century) is the second most
important woman in our registration, followed by Thecla Schphorst (late twentieth
century to the present).
Early in the new century, many interests such as films, electronic music, digital
art, science and technology, robotics, designated, telecommunications expand
our understanding of the process leading new and interdisciplinary research
certainly influenced by the emergence of the World Wide Web, the Internet. The
performance was enriched not just with new ideas but also with new hardwares
such as cameras, video projectors, microphones, sensors, synthesizers and software.
As the music had done before, the dance too has been taking possession of this
technology, for the creation of movements and choreography now benefit from
the programming language, designated, animation and film editing.
Added to that, Clarinda Mac Low research proposes that dance is a communication
body-to-body between the dancers and the audience, and continuation, with the
use of these new technologies would not be pushing choreographers compete with
technology but just showing a way to learning and working with technology and
maybe subvert it and use it as art.
We cannot forget to register the choreographer Dawn Stoppiello, one of the creator’s
team of the software Isadora with Mark Coniglio of Troika Ranch Dance Theater,
as another modern matriarch so important in the history of dance and technology,
specially her contribution to the development of a choreographic interactive
language in dance performances. Stoppiello highlights the importance of interactive
systems to meet these available to the largest number of artists interested
in an increasingly simple and accessible to anyone with some training and familiarity
with the computer. Stoppiello believe that in our generation young people are
very close to a generation of computers, as soon as possible we will have an
audience to interact in excellent performances and, increasingly, we are combining
two seemingly incompatible realms for some people: dance and technology.
Let's look at ways to describe a new aesthetic of interactivity in the dance,
of course in dance at one first we need to recognize the context of programming
languages and artistic changes made in the digital age, with the possibility
of image processing real time. It is one of our difficulties in our country,
Brazil, than women, so specified, that our dance students in dance graduation
course have dominated the most basic programming tools and software uses, we
can say that in Brazil, in dance area, only now the students start using computers
for video editing dances, and other more interactive option that requires deeper
knowledge in computer languages. It seems to be only one a frame of a small
town, of a specific group of people, but it reveals the whole situation even
lived in Brazil, also in South America, if we compare with the possibilities
and autonomy that young women have in Europe and the U.S.A.
How to change a trajectory of these female bodies get used to execute the wishes
of the choreographers who are mostly men? Bodies are being more feminine and
docile since childhood by own dance that domesticate these bodies? The dance
is seen in Brazil even as something to embellished and sculpt the female body,
and not as a form of expressionist art, rebellious, much less as a way of developing
the feminine discourse of her own body and authority, with few exceptions of
recent contemporary dance productions. It is part of our school of Dance role
to expand the notion of female corporeality building a more libertarian way,
including tools for these bodies to be more independent, supplying ways to construct
creative and technological autonomy in order to make a significant change in
the former model and greatly strengthened in the countries of South America
where most people think that technology is not a field of research for women.
There is still much to write, to fight, to do ... I write this document by Loie
Fuller, Maya Deren, Alegra Snyder, Dawn Stoppiello, by Gretchen Schiller, Lygia
Clark, Ludmila Pimentel and my artistic partner Mariana Carranza, for all my
students, FOR US WOMEN…
Literaturhinweise / References
See SCHILLER,
Gretchen. The Kinesfield: A Study of Movement-based interactive and choreographic
art. University of Plymouth, Doctor of Philosophy, Science, Technology and Art
Research. School of Computing, Faculty of Technology. England: University of
Plymouth, 2003, pp.14-15.
For Schiller interactive art based on the movement is multifaceted, both may
belongs to the sites of dance and technology, interactive arts and cinema dance,
in her thesis Schiller proposes that all esses terms are collectively called
"mediadance". Mediadance is one of the many forms of art that integrates
computer-based technologies, thus is a part of general developments in technologically
mediated systems, which include interactive art, interactive art CD-ROM-based,
virtual reality, net art, performance, technologically mediated and video games.
SNYDER, Allegra Fuller. “Three kinds of Dance Film: A Welcome Clarification”,
Dance Magazine, vol.39, september 1965, pp. 34-39, “The Relationship of
Film to Dance” A Report and Analysis of Problems, Needs, Posibilities
and Potentials in this Area” (artigo not published by the NEA Dance Program
Office, Washington DC, March-June, 1968).
BIRRINGER, Johannes. "Dance and Interactivity" [online]. Available
at: http://art.ntu.ac.uk/performance_research/birringer/dai.htm [Query: 2005].
The collective i-Arch bodies is formed by Ludmila Pimentel, Mariana Carranza
and Stephan Wolf.
School of Dance at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Es la primera Escuela
de grado en Danza de Brasil, tuve su fundación en 1956. School is the
first degree in Dance from Brazil, had its foundation in 1956.:
Texte und Kommentare zum Labor 2010 werden hier veröffentlicht
Texts and commentaries on the 2010 lab and related research subjects will be published here.