e-Dance project

Day 2 of the Sandpit – Simon’s view:

The morning was spent in a dance studio with Helen and Sita (choreographers) and Amalia, one of Helen’s team, introducing the technologists (Mike, Andrew, Anya and me) to their world. We reconnected with our bodies as they walked us through movement exercises that helped us to glimpse what it is to be a dancer, and how a visual language can be built up. We each worked on a short ‘performance’ (all 15 seconds of it) composed from movements based on our names, then combined them in pairs, and culminating in an improvisational piece with all of us performing, and trying to respond creatively to what was going on around us. Great fun! But more importantly, hugely complex, helping us appreciate how much is going on at any moment for a dancer.

We rounded off the morning by playing with a dance DVD which featured an interactive, annotated timeline for each dance clip. This helped the viewer navigate flexibly to the point of interest — just like we generate in the Memetic replay interface! The positive response that this DVD always gets from dancers is hopefully an encouraging sign of how Memetic will be received…

In the afternoon we moved into the new theatre, where we ‘learnt to be choreographers’, and Helen and Sita got their hands dirty using the software. Helen directed Amalia and Lisa, another dancer, through several sequences of a multimedia piece Helen has been choreographing. Our job was to get some insight into the process.

It was great to see some real dancing after our morning’s efforts!…

Then Mike and Anya took over, inventing some new variations, and experiencing what it is like to work with dancers to refine an idea.

Meanwhile, Andrew got Memetic running locally on Helen’s laptop so she now has a portable ‘Access Gird recording studio’ she can start playing with, while I created a dance annotation stencil in Compendium. This enabled the real time annotation of points to which the choreographer wants to return for reflection, eg. when a particular dancer does something, a moment that works/doesn’t work, an intervention from the choreographer, or a compositional strategy.

Sita and Helen then experimented with this to annotate key moments in the rehearsal, which opened up some great discussions about future requirements to support flexible structures.

If I’ve learnt anything today, it’s that emergent structure, themes, patterns are central to how choreographers work. Our e-science knowledge cartography and video replay tools must support this.

OK, so here  we all are at Univ. Bedfordshire as we meet for the first “Sandpit”. Over the next two days the choreographers and technologists will be learning about each others’ worlds… playing with the media and learning how dancers work. 

An article that discusses the evolving relationship to technology in the practice-led research of Ersatz Dance will be published later this year in the International Journal of Performing Arts & Digital Media.

ERSATZ DANCING: NEGOTIATING THE LIVE AND MEDIATED IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE PRACTICE

Helen Bailey

Abstract: This paper will focus on the practice-led research of dance-theatre company, Ersatz Dance and how the Company has negotiated and defined the relationship between live and mediated performance in their work. It will track the evolving relationship the Company has with a range of technologies. It will focus on the impact of recent research using virtual research environments (VREs). It will consider the ways in which VREs can provide a new context for practice-led research in dance. It will focus on the role VREs have played in defining new methodological approaches to composition and the contribution to the ongoing debates concerning ‘presence’, ‘liveness’ and ‘virtual embodiment’ in performance.

Preprint: bailey_ijpadm2007.pdf

The e-Dance project was announced this morning by Malcolm Atkinson, the e-Science Envoy. In his keynote on the future of e-Science at the UK e-Science All Hands Conference, as he summarised the projects funded in the joint AHRC+EPSRC+JISC programme. 

e-Dance is highlighted today in the JISC briefing Research in the arts and humanities: an overview of JISC activities.  

“e-Science in the arts and humanitiesSuch investigations are not only opening up new avenues in arts and humanities research, but are also testing and extending the present range of e-science technologies. An example is the development of the Access Grid, a form of advanced video conferencing for distributed collaborations in performing arts and motion capture (see box left).   

Dancing with virtual partners

A ground-breaking project on dance choreography is being funded by the joint AHRC/EPSRC/JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative. Led by the University of Bedfordshire, using Access Grid technology, Relocating Choreographic Process will develop a suite of software tools to enable choreographers to annotate dance video recordings, plan collaborative pieces using networked virtual spaces over the internet, and weave material from recordings into live performances. This will give the Access Grid, originally developed for advanced video conferencing purposes, a powerful and exciting new role as a medium for collaborative artistic performance and related research.”

A presentation introducing the e-Dance project was given today by Helen Bailey at DRHA2007 Dartington College of Arts, Devon on 9 September 2007.   Slides:  drha2007_slides.pdf

Welcome to the website for e-Dance, a project to deliver e-Science multimedia collaboration and annotation tools to choreographers rehearsing and performing over the Access Grid. This project was funded under the joint AHRC+EPSRC+JISC e-Science Initiative, based on the proposal entitled:

“Relocating Choreographic Process: The impact of Grid technologies and collaborative memory on the documentation of practice-led research in dance.”