Algorithms for Movement: CD-ROMs by William Forsythe & Jo Fabian

CD-ROMS REVIEWED: Improvisation Technologies. A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, William Forsythe, ed., Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, 1999; No Fish, No Cheese. Ten Years of Theatre, Jo Fabian, ed., Department/fabian dept., Berlin, 2001; curious.com, Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, eds., Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe, 1999.

If video was the favored documentary and creative technology for dance and performance artists in the 80s and 90s, computers and internet servers, with their vastly enhanced storage capacities, are now becoming the preferred interactive medium for archiving and presenting performance. Like museums which have started to exhibit their artworks online, performance, music, and media arts venues as well as individual artists themselves increasingly explore electronic models of documentation and dissemination. The advantages are obvious: the same multimedia authoring tools can be used for the interactive design of a CD-ROM or DVD platform and for uploading its content to a website.

The Digital Performance Archive at Nottingham Trent University (http://art.ntu.ac.uk/dpa) recently began to invite practitioners to have their work included in an extensive on-line database, thus documenting and preserving theatre, dance, and web-based performances that already incorporate digital media or that can be transcribed from analog video to digital formats. Another advantage that will attract dance historians and notators, in particular, is the fact that much larger amounts of digital information (image, sound, text, interviews, stage and costume designs, notation, etc.), without deterioration of the signal as in older celluloid and video media, can be compressed onto the small silver discs or stored on hard drives. The increasing sophistication of hypertextual and interactive design of such graphic, sonic, and textual materials thus allows comprehensive documentations of choreographies or rehearsal processes of creation which have hitherto been unthinkable.

Improvisation Technologies, created by William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet and technical designers at the ZKM over a period of five years (1994-99), is an outstanding example of a CD-ROM that offers a rich and complex insider perspective on the methodologies of creative process, a "school of perception" that ingeniously links theory and practice to place the user in the studio and make familiar the large palette of terms and organizational metaphors employed in Forsythe's "initiations" for movement. First created at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in the form of an interactive computer installation, intended for the professional use of the Frankfurt Ballet dancers, the four gigabyte hard drive version of Improvisation Technologies attracted such attention that Forsythe and his collaborators decided to release a revised CD-ROM version as a special issue of the ZKM digital arts edition with the support of the German Dance Archive in Cologne.

The CD-ROM is divided into 60 video chapters, made up of lecture demonstrations in which Forsythe shows the essential principles of his improvisation techniques. Dance sequences, performed by Christine Buerkle, Noah D. Gelber, Thomas McManus, and Crystal Pite, can be called up as further illustrations. Also included is Forsythe's performance of Solo (1995) which—like the other rehearsal sequences—can be watched in real time or in slow motion. The interconnecting threads of the CD-ROM's hypertext are mapped clearly and systematically, introducing the most important terms and operations of Forsythe's vocabulary which can be accessed from the composite dancer-image on the front page or the main pull-down menu ("LINES," "WRITING," "REORGANIZING," "ADDITIONS"). The structure of the mapping allows constant navigation between "T" (theory) and "E" (danced examples), as well as "P" (Forsythe's complete solo), while Forsythe's visual and verbal demonstrations encourage an analytical approach to the creation, composition, and modification (e.g., "reverse inscription," "room inscription," "u-ing," "o-ing," etc) of movement in space as well as to the choreographer's understanding and use of "anatomical representation," "isometries," and bodily...