[dance-tech] Re: Sensordance, interactive game, webcam dramaturgy #3

• From: "Ludmila Pimentel" <ludmilapimentel@xxxxxxxxxxx>
• To: Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
• Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:12:44 -0300

Thanks you Birringer!
It is a pleasure.

I also want to go on the discussion:

(1) on the theoretical/conceptual level, these forms of dancing with digital technologies are constituting a widening spectrum of new performance, and I just mentioned some "genres" of such work as these terms (e.g. sensor choreography, for example) draw attention to a particular mode of live composition or real time synthesis, as we would know it also from the fields of electronic music or interactive art using certain specific interfaces.

I was trying to argue that new interface designs in live performance alter our older notions of dance and choreography. As they have altered our practical work. modes of composition, and modes of real time synthesis in live art.

(for example, one would also need to distinguish, say, between a diptych or triptych video installation, such as Bill Viola's current "Love/Death: The Tristan Project", which is based on edited digital film; and a triptych such as Stuart Simpson's "Formaggio Con Queso", which uses a generative algorithm to randomly select the components of video, spoken word, soundtrack and ambience from the database and "wobbles" them; and a wobbled triptych such as the one I described where the dancer moves the images and live-edits them from the interactive programmed data bases)........

(2) on the semantic and pragmatic level, your are quite right in raising the question of the contents or the "sense" of what it is the performance manifests.

I have rarely seen a discussion here on this list about what the works mean and how they make sense and what kind of sense they make.

sure, we can do it about some works...

We often tend to talk about "technical scripts" or the methods of using certain designs in performance, as we are weary of offering our own interpretations of what we think our works express.

But you are asking about ideas and concepts behind or in the work, or conveyed by the work.

I believe that we do tend to address our ideas and concepts in the particular compositions we choose to enact, and I think my reference to Troika Ranch ("16 (R)evolutions") and to Cloud Gate Dance Theatre's "Cursive" was meant to raise questions about their visual and sense effect on us -- both dance works, indeed, construct worlds and tell stories -- which we cannot always say about pieces generated in the dance technology community. In both works mentioned above the choreography is coherent and clear, I think, and completely developed with the scenograhic and/or digital visualisations as an organic whole. Cloud Gate, in particular, is using a movement form and a kinetic expressivity which is closely, intimately, directly inspired by both calligraphy and martial arts (intermixed with ballet, modern dance movement, t'ai chi and Peking Opera styles), and the dance "writes" an emotional graphics, so to speak, which is very powerfully culturally located (in the ancient Chinese traditions of calligraphy as a visual and narrative art), thus also make a ;political statement, as well as abstracted in the overall stage pictures of "flowing ink" or floating forms......, and thus thoroughly modernist. To describe Troika Ranch's piece in modernist or postmodernist terms is more difficult. Their choreography is conventional, the transformational quality of live movement/digital visualization is eccentric, the humanist (evolutionary) ethos is supplanted by the posthuman technicity of the visual writing which is perhaps from the body but it is dis/sociative. The virtual writing could be said to be telecommunicational, it has no culturally locatable context and is not subject to being contextualized, therefore categorized or conceptualized.

I could tell you more about "See you in Walhalla" and its movement language, if you asked me.

As an aside,....... it seems to me that we are at an interesting point in time, no?

For me great!

the dance tech list is quiet lately, the urge to discuss technics and meanings of new dance works seems dormant.

New writings in the dance scholarship arena?  hmmmm.

"Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement" , by Andre Lepecki, (London: Routledge,2006) leaves me quite cold, its obsession with melancholic solipsism in choreography and its favouring of the deconstructionist "still-acts" of Konzept-Tanz seem philosophically as far removed from our practice as the tired poststructuralist musings on "absence" and "presence" in Gerald Siegmund: Abwesenheit: Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes (Wetzlar: transcript, 2006).

Probably more provocative for our discussions might be two recent dissertations, which tend to address the new technologies of movement philosophically, practically, and spiritually:

Olu Taiwo, "Interfacing with my Interface", PhD thesis, University of Southampton 2006.
and
Sher Doruff': "The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram". (PhD thesis, University of London, 2006) Go to SD's website for the text (http://spresearch.waag.org/papers.html)

Any responses to these writings?

I am also waiting...

regards
Johannes Birringer
Interaktionslabor
http://interaktionslabor.de

thanks a lot,
Ludmila Pimentel

• » Related posts
• » Previous by Date
• » Next by Date
• » This Month's Archive
• » Main Archive Page

• » View list details
• » Manage your subscription