Johannes Birringer

Dance and interactivity

A growing number of practitioners in the international community of choreographers and performers has begun to experiment with computer-assisted work linking dance and new technologies. This hardly comes as a surprise, since dance-on-film and videodance had already attracted considerable attention, at least since the 1980s. Earlier experiments, such as the astonishing films by Maya Deren, take us back to the 1940s, and todays motion capture-based animations find their historical roots in late nineteenth century motion studies in chronophotography and early cinema (Muybridge, Marey, Melies). Furthermore, dancemakers, researchers, and teachers have used film or video as a vital means of documenting or analyzing existing choreographies. Some scholars and software programmers 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.

The Sound of Movement Wearables: Performing UKIYO

ABSTRACT Although interest in wearable/mobile technologies in todays world of social networks, fashion and lifestyle industries is on the rise, the performing arts rarely integrate body-worn technologies into their dramaturgies. After some pioneering efforts in music and audio art, dance and theater practices have slowly begun to benefit from performance design investigating “sounding” garments that transduce the sensuality of movement gestures through the extension of wearable instrument-costumes. Describing their choreographic installation UKIYO (2009-) as an example of sound-motion-design research, the authors highlight integrated methods for creating particularized audiophonic, amplificatory and kinaesonic garments to be worn by dancers, actors and musicians in interactive/responsive environments.

Dance and not dance

When we attend a dance festival we tend to know what we are looking for: new dance works, perhaps some well-known works by prominent choreographers (if we are nostalgic or enjoy a historical perspective), fresh ideas by younger and emerging choreographers, some experimental pieces by cross-over artists, and promising new companies from abroad to expand our horizons. If it is not dedicated to a retrospective, say, of canonical works by Balanchine, Tudor, Kylian, or Graham, nor celebrates national treasures such as Pina Bausch or Alvin Ailey, we expect a contemporary dance festival to provide insight into how dance is evolving, how changes relate to cultural shifts and, perhaps, to a new generation of audience that drives the change.

Moveable worlds/digital scenographies

ABSTRACT The mixed reality choreographic installation UKIYO explored in this article reflects an interest in scenographic practices that connect physical space to virtual worlds and explore how performers can move between material and immaterial spaces. The spatial design for UKIYO is inspired by Japanese hanamichi and western fashion runways, emphasizing the research production companys commitment to various creative crossovers between movement languages, innovative wearable design for interactive performance, acoustic and electronic sound processing and digital image objects that have a plastic as well as an immaterial/virtual dimension. The work integrates various forms of making art in order to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or which connect visual and kinaesthetic/tactile/auditory experiences. The ‘Moveable Worlds’ in this essay are also reflections of the narrative spaces, subtexts and auditory relationships in the mutating matrix of an installation-space inviting the audience to move around and follow its sensorial experiences, drawn near to the bodies of the dancers.

Interactive dance, the body and the Internet

Abstract This essay discusses the use and integration of network and communication technology in digital arts practice, particularly in dance. After contextualizing the concept of interactivity, it addresses issues relevant to form, practice, production and presentation in regard to interactive dance, the use of streaming media (telepresence) and network infrastructure. As an example, the author describes the polysite telepresence production of Here I come again/Flying Birdman and related interactive projects with collaborators in Europe and Brazil, in order to reflect on the collaborative cultural politics of online performance.

Medea: Landscapes beyond History

Argonaut-landscapes Berlin: a deterritorialized city trapped between different historical times and political systems, walled into a structural relationship between the similitude and difference of East-West, overcharged with the seductiveness of its schizophrenic space and the negative suspense created by its theoretical future. An overdetermined present: the capital of Germany, Pale Mother of its self-divisions. When Bertolt Brecht looked down onto the streets of the May Day demonstrations in 1929, he watched with horror how the Berlin police, led by Social Democrats, opened fire on

What score? Pre-choreography and post-choreography

ABSTRACT This article introduces a brief historical reflection on the current reception or production of dance and ‘choreographic objects’ in venues of documentation/exhibition (museum) and experimentation (laboratory), reviewing the curatorial direction of ‘Move: Choreographic You’ (Hayward Gallery) and Xavier Le Roys ‘Retrospective’ (Fundació Antoni Tàpies). Previewing the artists’ writings in this issue of IJPADM, the author then comments on some of the key terms in the current ‘mobilization of the term choreography’, emphasizing the remarkable interdisciplinary expansion of dance research and the concerted efforts that are under way to document, analyse, display and propel choreographic processes and languages to a much wider audience, thus also making available a diverse range of unique methods of scoring, recording, teaching and conceptualizing movement within an expanding international culture of performance and mediated arts (with the role of online dance platforms and archives gaining an ever greater significance).

Interactivity: ‘user testing’ for participatory artworks

Abstract This article explores the new phenomenon of ‘user testing’ and response behaviour for interactive digital installations and programmed environments. After contextualizing the concept of interactivity, it addresses issues relevant to the research in participatory artforms, interaction design, production development (prototyping) and scientific testing comparing interactive dance and digital installations. As a test case, the author describes the DAMPF (Dance and Media Performance Fusions) Lab, a collaborative project supported by various European media organizations, in order to report on the specific challenges arising in the prototyping of interaction design for participatory environments which ask the user to engage a responsive system.

Cultural-based visual expression: emotional analysis of human face via Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF)

Peking Opera as a branch of Chinese traditional cultures and arts has a very distinct colourful facial make-up for all actors in the stage performance. Such make-up is stylised in nonverbal symbolic semantics which all combined together to form the painted faces to describe and symbolise the background, the characteristic and the emotional status of specific roles. A study of Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF) was taken as an example to see how information and meanings can be effectively expressed through the change of facial expressions based on the facial motion within natural and emotional aspects. The study found that POPF provides exaggerated features of facial motion through images, and the symbolic semantics of POPF provides a high-level expression of human facial information. The study has presented and proved a creative structure of information analysis and expression based on POPF to improve the understanding of human facial motion and emotion.

Bauhaus, Constructivism, Performance

In the winter of 1929, the Bauhaus arranged one its famed parties to which guests of the Dessau art school were invited to wear “something metallic.” The Metal Party, with is fantastical metallic costumes, and decorations placed throughout the studios, stairways, corridors and open areas, was documented by a few photographs and described by a local newspaper. The tone of the review is full of awe at the inventiveness of the mise en scene. The entire new building in Dessau, which opened its doors in 1925, had been transformed for a temporary festivity inspired by the design vision undergirding the various disciplines taught in the school’s curriculum. There are numerous questions that can be raised about the performance vision implied by these large scale parties (e.g. the Kite Festival, the Lantern Festival, the White Party), trying to link it to the Bauhaus dances, Moholy-Nagy’s constructivist film/photography, and the theatrical legacy of a radical “design-in motion” concept largely forgotten today. Curiously, Oskar Schlemmer’s design-choreography has been mostly treated as a minor historical footnote, while it actually, as I will argue, deserves to be more fully examined in the context of twenty-first century digital art and performance installations.