[dance-tech] "Digital" Dance


As an ammendum to the last message on the history of digital dance, I have to say I find the whole term quite curious. In 1994, I produced two videos for Charleroi Danses' "Ex Machina". In 1996, I built a live tracking system for "Moving Target" -- again, by Charleroi Danses. The videos I made for "Ex Machina" were created on a Macintosh Quadra using a very early version of Adobe Premiere. This was almost an entirely digital process, however the end product was "video" so most people would consider the performance a piece of "video dance". On the otherhand, "Moving Target" had a Silicon Graphics computer sitting up in the lighting box and projected live, computer-generated images onto the stage (at least during the initial performances) , so most people would consider it "digital dancing".

Unfortunately, by this definition, neither of the two pieces I mentioned earlier, Dumb Type's "*OR*" and Cunningham/Riverbed's "Hand Drawn Spaces" qualify as "digital dance". Many people are willing to call "*OR*" video dance, but they insist that "Hand Drawn Spaces" is digital, not because digital technologies were involved in it's creation. It is, after all, just a video projected on stage with the performers. "Hand Drawn Spaces" is digital dance because it looks the way we expect digital dance to look. It's not photo-realistic. It's abstract, with saturated colours against a flat background.

In other words, is "digital dance" a technical term, or is it an aesthetic?

-k


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