Sarah Whatley

Born digital; dance in the digital age

Abstract This article will explore the convergence of dance and digital technologies with reference to a project that is bringing together a leading choreographer and a team of researchers to create a digital archive. The key question that the article will address is whether a re-examination of digital technology in relation to its representation of the corporeal, coupled with a widening knowledge base and acceptance by creators and audiences of ‘experiencing’ performance within radically re-defined spheres, will encourage a new generation of ‘born digital’ dancers and choreographers with the necessary skills and experience of digital performativity to enable them to develop and engage with much more intuitive digital tools to support and expand the horizons of the choreographic process.

Archives of the Dance (21): Siobhan Davies Dance Online

In 2006, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant was awarded to researchers at Coventry University to create a digital archive of the work of Siobhan Davies Dance. The award is significant in acknowledging the limited resources readily available to dance scholars as well as to dance audiences in general. The archive, Siobhan Davies Dance Online, will be the first digital dance archive in the UK. Mid-way through the project, Sarah Whatley, who is leading the project, reflects on some of the challenges in bringing together the collection, the range of materials that is going to be available within the archive and what benefits the archive should bring to the research community, the company itself and to dance in general.

WhoLoDancE: Towards a methodology for selecting Motion Capture Data across different Dance Learning Practice

In this paper we present the objectives and preliminary work of WhoLoDancE a Research and Innovation Action funded under the European Unions Horizon 2020 programme, aiming at using new technologies for capturing and analyzing dance movement to facilitate whole-body interaction learning experiences for a variety of dance genres. Dance is a diverse and heterogeneous practice and WhoLoDancE will develop a protocol for the creation and/or selection of dance sequences drawn from different dance styles for different teaching and learning modalities. As dance learning practice lacks standardization beyond dance genres and specific schools and techniques, one of the first project challenges is to bring together a variety of dance genres and teaching practices and work towards a methodology for selecting the appropriate shots for motion capturing, to acquire kinetic material which will provide a satisfying proof of concept for Learning scenarios of particular genres. The four use cases we are investigating are 1) classical ballet, 2) contemporary dance, 3) flamenco and 4) Greek folk dance.

Siobhan Davies RePlay: (Re)visiting the digital archive

ABSTRACT This article provides an in-depth description of the many layers and processes involved in constructing a digital dance archive; Siobhan Davies RePlay. Three years after the archive went ‘live’ the article revisits its development and explores the impact of the archival process on the artists and researchers involved. It traces the ways in which a digital archive can be seen as an extension of the artists work, reflecting back on the artists creative methods and influencing future projects. By looking out to other digital dance projects the article assesses the ways in which digital archives contribute to a growing number of digital dance resources and build a new environment for the making, teaching, viewing and appreciation of dance.

On An/Notations

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Motion Capturing Emotions

Abstract The paper explores the activities conducted as part of WhoLoDancE: Whole Body Interaction Learning for Dance Education which is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project. In particular, we discuss the motion capture sessions that took place at Motek, Amsterdam as well as the dancers’ experience of being captured and watching themselves or others as varying visual representations through the HoloLens. HoloLens is Microsoft’s first holographic computer that you wear as you would a pair of glasses. The study embraced four dance genres: Ballet, Contemporary, Flamenco and Greek Folk dance. We are specifically interested in the kinesthetic and emotional engagement with the moving body and what new corporeal awareness may be experienced. Positioning the moving, dancing body as fundamental to technological advancements, we discuss the importance of considering the dancer’s experience in the real and virtual space. Some of the artists involved in the project have offered their experiences, which are included, and they form the basis of the discussion. In addition, we discuss the affect of immersive environments, how these environments expand reality and what effect (emotionally and otherwise) that has on the body. The research reveals insights into relationships between emotion, movement and technology and what new sensorial knowledge this evokes for the dancer.

Bodily extensions and performance

In contemporary technological society, bodily extension has become a regular occurrence for many people. Extensions can attach to or connect with human bodies to adjust, change or augment them in physical or virtual spaces, including artificial limbs, contact lenses and digital avatars. They can be as hi-tech as a surgeon manipulating a device to operate remotely on a patient in another country, as media-present as a Paralympic athlete with running blades, or as everyday as a blind person using a stick. We might use extensions ourselves or witness others using them in workplaces, social environments, at home, and in the media. They may be perceived as enabling tools by some, replacing or augmenting body parts, capacities or abilities, perhaps leading to superhuman feats (Thompson 2012). However, others may see them as disabling restrictions, with their use enforced by social or cultural expectations about what a body should be (Betcher 2001). Inevitably, extensions are incorporated into body images and implicated in social identities (Serlin 2004). This Special Issue on ‘Bodily Extensions and Performance’ raises critical questions about the nature of extended bodies and body-technology practices. The six essays are concerned with the lived experiences of such bodies, highlighting processes of incorporation and hybridity (Donnarumma), influence and exchange (O’Brien), blurring and entanglement (Wilson), shifting identities (Riszko), destabilisation and metamorphosis (Stępień) and defamiliarisation of the everyday (Sobchack). The increasingly complex blending of bodies and technologies has corresponded with a rise in the intellectual popularity of the cultural theories of posthumanism and new materialism. These philosophies offer direct monist challenges to the dualist tendencies of humanist perspectives, denying priority of mind over matter, and of flesh over other forms of material (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Braidotti 2013). ‘Bodily Extensions and Performance’ was an intentionally provocative choice of title for this issue, given that ‘bodily extension’ implies the centrality of a body to be extended, and at least one of our authors has responded by rejecting this conceptualisation. Yet we argue that neither monist nor dualist perspectives are able to appreciate experiences of bodily extension. In theories and practices of performance, bodies are well recognised as sites of knowledge. The importance of sensory perception, including the internal senses of proprioception and kinaesthesia, is understood in relation to the specific communication of affect and empathy (Massumi 2002; Reynolds and Reason 2012). If we are to understand what it means to live as flesh-technology entities, and to grasp the sensory and ethical implications thereof, performance is an important disciplinary arena in which to debate questions of bodily experience. The articles in this Special Issue address the coming together of flesh and other materials, acknowledging processes of assembly and the influence of interfaces in the fluid becoming of embodied extended beings. Bodies are accustomed to extending their internal sensory fields to include other materials, with the blind person’s stick as a prime example. Kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses can be pushed out into those extensions with surprising alacrity

Materiality, Immateriality and the Dancing Body: The Challenge of the Inter in the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Since the turn of the millennium we have witnessed the beginnings of a growing number of projects that bring fresh attention to questions surrounding the documentation and dissemination of the processes and products of dance and wider performance practices. New kinds of digital inscriptions and tools for capturing and rendering movement are now available to access and study dance in innovative ways, raising questions about authorship and the extent to which dance is an evolving, mutable process mediated via many different encounters. These meetings may be between dance makers, audiences, galleries, theatres, programmers and with experts from different scholarly disciplines and subject domains. Many of these initiatives intentionally traverse analogue, digital and embodied methods of transmission and offer alternative ways to think about how dance is visualised, remembered, interpreted and transformed. Choreographers and performance makers are also drawing from practical and intellectual enquiries into the materiality and immateriality of the dancing body as source for making work. As a consequence, choreography, as a conceptual and practical process, is continually changing, informed as much by the integration and exploitation of digital technologies in the making, documenting and preservation of the work, as by the individual proclivities of dance artists.

A Conceptual Framework for Creating and Analyzing Dance Learning Digital Content

As they are mainly based on bodily experiences and embodied knowledge, dance and movement practices present a great diversity and complexity across genre and context. Thus, developing a conceptual framework for archiving, managing, curating and analysing movement data, in order to develop reusable datasets and algorithms for a variety of purposes, remains a challenge. In this work, based on relevant literature on movement representation and existing systems such as Laban Movement Analysis, as well as working with dance experts through workshops, focus groups, and interviews, we propose a conceptual framework for creating, and analysing dance learning content. The conceptual framework, has been developed within an interdisciplinary project, that brings together technology and human computer interaction researchers, computer science engineers, motion capture experts from industry and academia, as well as dance experts with background on four different dance genres: contemporary, ballet, Greek folk, and flamenco. The framework has been applied: a) as a guidance to systematically create a movement library with multimodal recordings for dance education, including four different dance genres, b) as the basis for developing controlled vocabularies of dance for manual and automated annotation, and c) as the conceptual framework to define the requirements for similarity search and feature extraction.

Body Extension and the Law: Medical Devices, Intellectual Property, Prosthetics and Marginalisation (Again)

ABSTRACT This interdisciplinary paper, drawing on empirical and doctrinal research regarding artificial limbs and digital avatars, analyses two concepts which are argued to be core to the person – integrity and identity. From the perspective of a person who is a prosthetic user, the paper then evaluates the extent to which two legal regimes which are highly relevant to prosthetics, medical devices regulation (and its delivery) and intellectual property (and its power), engage with the person, integrity and identity with a focus on approaches taken to authority and control. The paper criticises the meaning which law generates regarding the person. It calls for new approaches to be taken by the legal regimes explored to the person, identity and integrity; and for a new multifaceted interdisciplinary driven approach to the person.