Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark

In 1999, noted choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones, in collaboration with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar of the OpenEndedGroup, presented an installation at the intersection of dance, drawing, and digital imaging.¹ Ghostcatching features Jones’s previously improvised movements recorded using motion capture technology, which in the piece manifest in various virtual dancing bodies. With reflective motion capture sensors placed on Jones’s body as he improvised, cameras positioned around him recorded the movements of each sensor, coding Jones’s motions into data for Kaiser and Eshkar to re-design. In Ghostcatching, Jones’s dancing body—which arguably had become a sign for black gay male sexuality by the time artist Robert Mapplethorpe photographed him in 1985 as both portrait and figure study—is physically absent yet virtually present.² In motion capture, a digital character model is generated from an armature or a human body with the purpose of recording only the movements of the performer, not his or her visual appearance. The virtual bodies in Ghostcatching seem to follow this formula. Whereas the digital characters in Ghostcatching refer to Jones’s physical body, which generated them, they are not meant to reproduce his likeness or visual appearance. But Jones’s virtual dancing is cast from his own singular and iconic movements. While the labor of his dancing is mediated, re-mediated, and ultimately subsumed by motion capture technology, his bodies in virtual and physical form remain inextricably linked. Thus, a tension between liveness and likeness emerges from this use of motion capture coupled with the recurring presence of Jones’s signature movements, voice, breathing, and recognizable style of storytelling in Ghostcatching. Jones is well known for deploying autobiography and recited text alongside movement as a technique for making dances. To this end, his “bodies”—physically absent yet virtually present—duplicate each other, complicating the relation between sign and referent that motion capture technology seeks to disrupt.

In 2010, just over ten years after Ghostcatching premiered, the OpenEndedGroup and Jones presented After Ghostcatching as part of The Dissolve, SITE Santa Fe’s 2010 Biennial.³ Specially commissioned for the Biennial, After Ghostcatching is “a re-envisioning” composed of a larger sampling of Jones’s motions and vocalizations captured for Ghostcatching in three dimensions (Kaiser 2010). What can these two pieces tell us about the politics of bodies and identities in the twenty-first century? Can a work succeed in its efforts to broach identity while rejecting the tyranny of categories such as race, gender, and sexuality that have become prominent features of Jones’s oeuvre? In this essay, I question the status of Jones’s raced, gendered, and sexed body in Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching to track a shift from so-called identity politics to a discourse of post-racialism over a ten-year period in U.S. history. In my reading, which positions dance as a visual medium, Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching mediate the multiple registers in which race and racial discourse, and by extension post-racial discourse, operate.⁴ Does race still matter? What role does the body play as a container of social and biological constructions of race in the face of body reductionism, critical theories of the body-as-text, and, more importantly, the techno-utopia of the digital as a new sphere of sociality? In spite of the persistence of visible markers such as skin color that are mobilized to construct racial subjects, to what degree is race actually, or solely, visual? To answer these questions, I explore the visual, haptic, and spatial registers of race in Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching by considering how Jones’s blackness is subject to and determined by specific media—photography and digital art, improvised dance, and choreographic form.

An analysis of Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching with regard to motion capture technology, digital art and imaging, and improvised, virtual dance highlights the ways in which race matters in the twenty-first century. I believe examining improvised, virtual dance and the use of motion capture technology in these two pieces, which span...