Dance and Media Technologies

The articles by Ann Dils, Scott deLahunta, and Timothy Murray that follow the introduction were assembled for this special section by PAJ contributing editor Johannes Birringer.

Beyond the Stage

During the last decade a small but burgeoning group of people in the international community of choreographers, performers, and media artists began to experiment with computer-assisted work linking dance and new technologies. A mail list was put in place (http://art.net/~dtz/), and a growing network of collaborative media projects triggered contentious internet debates about emerging definitions of "virtual" or "digital" dance. The strong interest among dancemakers in new media hardly came as a surprise, since dance-on-film and videodance had attracted considerable attention in the 80s, especially as choreographers, companies, researchers, and teachers began to use video as a vital means of documenting/promoting work or analyzing existing choreographies. Furthermore, some scholars and software programmers had published tools (LabanWriter, LifeForms) that attracted attention in the field of dance notation and preservation as well as among choreographers (e.g., Merce Cunningham) who wanted to utilize the computer for the invention and visualization of new movement possibilities.

In the mid-90s, I had begun to direct workshops on performance technologies, incorporating new compositional ideas and instruments such as cameras, video-projectors, sensors, or computer software. By the turn of the new century, many interests in related fields (film, digital arts, science and technology, design, engineering, medicine, telecommunications, etc.) furthered our understanding of complementary thinking processes that drive new interdisciplinary research and conceptual models influenced by the computer's information processing capabilities and the internet's global reach. Working in the expanded tradition of site-specific works, conceptual art, and performance, we embraced the sense that performance is process, that it is collaborative, and that it does not rely on one specific technique or vocabulary. Dance was organically extending its reach: choreography could include space, sculpture, light, video projection, and live electronic music just as easily as film editors mix their tracks or as installation artists construct complex scenarios of experience for the audience who enter the space of media. We realized that nothing would be the same again, as we gradually left the proscenium stage and found conventional production processes inadequate. New dance, involving technologies and interactive designs from the conceptual starting point, needed a different environment for its evolution.

Navigations and Interfaces

Technology has decisively challenged bodily boundaries and spatial realities, profoundly affecting the relations between humans and machines. The new convergences between dance and technology reflect back on the nature of dance, its physical-sensory relationship to space and the world, its immediate, phenomenological embodiedness, its lived experience in one place. Whether we are in a rehearsal studio, on the stage, or in the street or a discotheque, we are still in one place among other moving bodies when we dance, or "dance around," as William Forsythe calls it. But dance has taken the lead, among the theatrical arts, in absorbing technology as a creative tool, affording dancers and technologists the opportunity to explore interactive environments, virtual places, and integrated methods that have shifted artistic process. We no longer learn new steps or combinations; we do not solve movement problems.

First, the shift has implied the relocation of the compositional process into a laboratory-like environment. The directors of the Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) at Arizona State University refer to the "intelligent stage," where dancing takes place with computer-assisted design and MIDI interfaces in interactive environments which allow for a different "programming" of physical motion and motion sensing. At ISA the stage is wired for internet access and telematic transmission of streaming video and MIDI (Musical Instrument Data Interface) signals, while also featuring the "Very Nervous System" (VNS) design developed by sound artist David Rokeby. VNS is a system combining video cameras, an artificial perception system, computer, and synthesizer to create a space in which body...