practice

i never get enough time to practice improvised works with the installations they are performed in. sometime there s only a day or two of ‘exploration’ during which the tech staff are trying to fix faults in the system. this doesn’t really help you understand the ‘interactional’ context you are working in.

on the rare occasion that a work is made alongside the development of the system few choreographers are properly prepared. so many have unrealistic expectations of the sensitivity and control available that subtleness of the studio r&d work is dumped for visual and technical effect.

i think the trap that most choreographers fall into is esablishing a clear concept of the sound and visuals the technology creates, but only having a simple notion of the interface. however variable the interface i like to make it part of my own skin, and that means taking the time to learn about it, technically and physically.

round rainbow

temporal interference

yesterday i went to see a dance installation called Temporal Interference. putting aside my thoughts on the performance itself i was left wanting an hour or two to improvise in the space itself. i’ve always wondered why there are not more truly durational interactive dance installations in which the dace goes on all day. thats the kind of dance work i would like to see or perform in.

other posts on temporal  interference include: notes on temporal interference,  inside the interface & ti 4 n00bs

Dance Omi

thinking of applying for the Dance Omi International Dance Collective.

reflexions

© MaiKoh

i woke up early, did my salutations and went for a run followed by breakfast. met a nice guy called matt whilst eating breakfast and the conversation turned to why were were out so early. matt was also a dancer and had just done a bikram class, he asked about massage spas in the area so i figured it was a good chance to practice my massage and reflexology before class later today (i’m taking a course). so off we hopped, worked and had a chat afterwards.

he seemed to have a lot on his mind so i did most of the talking, but he said a few things that really stuck with me when i mentioned my frustrations with the performance technology work i do.

a good start to the day.

chromatic particles

tony schultz at the the winger blog writes about computer vision dance graphs:

My research uses computer vision algorithms to represent the body as a set of chromatic particles. Once the body is reduced to numbers it becomes possible to automatically recognize different poses. Once these landmarks are identified the computer can generate a map of the movement space in the form of a dance graph. Watch an example here.

computer vision is an umbrella term for image processing, image analysis and machine vision. i have become familiar with these terms over the last few year by chatting with the programmers who have worked on the same projects as me. looking at the sample tony seems to be using feature detection / blob extraction you can see where it doesn’t work properly, and gets confused (e.g. the legs become one particle).

as a dancer i would find such as system of notation hard to use, it does not give me enough information about how the body is moving. the flat particles are hard to read and there is no spatial reference. the only reason i vaguely understand it is because i am familiar with the style of choreography. i’m really not sure how useful this type software really is.

writing choreography and the body isn’t as automatic as tony suggests, there is much more to the dancing body than numerical analysis can graph.

a dance blog

© pathings

writing dance is hard, but not impossible. transcribing the physical to the textual incurrs loss, but also creates. diverse variations is a blog of dancing and writing. it will unfurl as it will …