e-Dance project

I did an interview with Rachel Gibson today.  She has been commissioned by the Arts Council of England to carry out a survey of digital technology and new media in dance.  The aim of the survey is to create an overview of digital capacity in the dance sector.  It was really interesting to discuss where the e-Dance Project is at the moment and where the research is going to take us in the next few months and into next year.  It was particularly interesting to think about this project and its relationship to the professional dance/arts sector.  There is a real challenge for us to engage with that community and dissemnate what we are doing effectively. 

An abstract has been submitted to the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting “Crossing Boundaries” conference to be held this September at the National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh University.  The title is ‘Dancing on the Grid: the use of e-Science tools to extend choreographic knowledge and develop new practice-led research methodologies’.

Simon and I were in Edinburgh on 6-7 May at the Arts & Humanities e-Science Projects meeting.  The event was co-hosted by AHeSSC www.ahessc.ac.uk the three Research Councils and NESC www.nesc.ac.uk.  The two-day event brought together the representatives from the seven funded projects.  We gave a presentation on the first day.  You can see the powerpoint attached below.  We also did a poster session in the evening and had a chance to catch-up in a less formal context with some of the other project teams.  The second day was led by Tobias, Stuart and Torsten from AHeSSC and provided a really useful context for discussion.  We also had a quite detailed tour of the www.arts-humanities.net site which is really interesting.  Torsten is going to link the e-Dance website in to it, which will hopefully generate more interest in and dialogue around the project.  Simon and I had a really good chat about the interdisciplinary concepts driving the project.  In the powerpoint you’ll see some slides towards the end that begin to articulate some of the thinking.  Simon might add some further throughts on that.

edinburgh.pdf

This is a draft of the paper that will be presented at ISEA2008 in Singapore this July.   

isea-paper-draft.pdf

We have submitted a proposal for a talk at the Access Grid Retreat 2008 in  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Please have a look at our paper

edance_agr2008 

and comments are welcome.

In March Helen was invited to give a guest lecture at King’s College London.  The lecture was a joint venture with Tobias Blanke from AHeSSC on The Creative Potential of e-Science. 

kclecture20081.ppt

A paper proposed by the project team has been accepted for presentation at ISEA2008, the International Symposium of Electronic Arts.  The title of the paper is – e-Dance: Relocating Choreographic Practice a New Modality for Performance and Documentation.  It will then be published via Leonardo in the conference proceedings. 

http://isea2008.org/page/1/

Symposium organised at the University of Salford by Mary Oliver; 20th November 2007. Salford news article at: http://www.adelphi.salford.ac.uk/adelphi/news/article/?id=14

This was a lively event discussing theatrical concepts of ‘nowness’ and ‘liveness’ especially for theatrical performances, although covered virtual spaces especially 2nd Life, and various different recording methods. Helen Bailey presented a range of associated topics relating to the JISC funded StereoBodies and e-Dance projects; which also included an overview of the recent related morphologies performance.

Question to ask is how e-Dance will mix in and relate to liveness – there are it appears 1001 different methods for recording part, most or all of a spatially displaced performance (over space) within an iterative multi-layered (over time) either within one set period or over an unknown multiple periods, event. The debate continues as to what is lost at each recording – and if indeed something actually is gained.

The Royal Premier of the Morphologies performance was performed over the 22nd Oct 2007.

Details from flyer: “Morphologies is a new piece of work by Ersatz Dance in collaboration with musicians from Symphonia Academica. Ersatz Dance and Symphonia Academica are both resident at the University of Bedfordshire. Morphologies is a performance that integrates live music and digital technologies to explore the visualization of space across the domains of dance and music.

It examines within a live performance context, the integration of video projection and motion-tracking, interactive software. This extends the research undertaken in the Stereobodies (2006) research project, a collaboration between Ersatz Dance and Martin J. Turner at the University of Manchester‘s Visualization Centre.

Ersatz Dance has been based at the University of Bedfordshire since 1998. The company has developed a national and international reputation for intellectually stimulating and cutting-edge work, that integrates a range of media in the dance context. The company comprises of a combination of academic staff and graduates from dance programmes at the University.

• Artistic Direction and Choreography: Helen Bailey
• Dancers: Lee Awanah, Amalia Garcia, James Hewison, Lisa Spackman
• Music: Goldberg Variations by JS Bach
• Musicians: Peter Bussereau (Violin), Paul Bennett (Viola), Peter Randell (Cello), Ikuko Sunamara (Violin)
• Digital Animation: Gareth Risdale
• Technical Production: Graham Hoare, Gareth Risdale

With special thanks to Martin J. Turner and Anja Le BLanc at Research Computing Services, University of Manchester“

The e-Dance predecesor CSAGE as a VRE (Virtual Research Environment) is briefly mentioned in a News article in JISC Inform Vol 19 – October 2007. DVD copy of the videos are available describing CSAGE as well as other VRE projects. This included a photo of the projected and post-edited StereoBodies performance.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/inform19
Copy of news article: “New videos showcase best in collaborative research Two videos that explain how projects from the first phase of JISC’s Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme are bringing researchers together through VREs have been launched.

Projects highlighted in the videos show how researchers in the materials sciences, for example, have been able to share results in real time with other remote teams of specialists; how dancers have been performing in remote environments (see image); how groups of historians have been ‘meeting’ remotely and collaborating across more than a dozen institutions, and so on.

Frederique van Till, JISC’s Programme Manager for the VRE programme, now in its second phase, said: ‘We’re delighted to have such a range of perspectives and research backgrounds on these films. What has really come through is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, just as no two research projects are the same.'”