{"id":162,"date":"2024-06-02T19:33:12","date_gmt":"2024-06-02T19:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/?p=162"},"modified":"2026-05-26T19:18:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T19:18:50","slug":"connecting-and-disconnecting-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/connecting-and-disconnecting-bodies\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting and Disconnecting Bodies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Johannes Birringer<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The article explores the relationship of dancing bodies and technology, pointing at blind spots and shifts occurring in this relationship during the last years. It reveals changes in terms of how bodily movement produces data, how a performer or immersant engages with interface environments that are programmable or networked. The notion of \u201cpost-choreography\u201d is a proposed framework for analyzing this new condition where the physical body telling a story through choreographed movement came to an end. The category of real-time enters through computational\/algorithmic processes and allows performer initiation of a broad range of live sampling and direct accessing of sound and image synthesis parameters, giving unpredictable directions to the work and enhancing the possibilities for interactive performances. Enhancement of system operations, however, tends to dispossess and compromise the performer. The article analyzes specific performance examples (for instance, Anti-Body<\/font> by Alexander Whitley Dance Company, 2022) and argues that, nowadays, interactivity and immersive installations create impressive works, overloaded with technological effects, but the human body is, problematically, missing.

Keywords<\/strong>: digital body-data, interactivity, post-choreography, real-time, immersion<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Older and Newer Dimensions<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

About ten years after joining the dance-technology movement in the mid-1990s, I began to notice more acutely how my view of choreography (working with physical bodies and motion in space and time) and technology (software programming and interface design using motion input to map various outputs) had evolved, how the passion to explore unknown dimensions in the partnership between dance and technologies had continued to excite me. When I first attended workshops organized by Scott deLahunta at Amsterdam\u2019s School of New Dance Development (\u201cThe Connected Body,\u201d 1994; \u201cConnecting Bodies,\u201d 1996), bringing together choreographers, performers, computer engineers, software writers, filmmakers and electronic music composers, the propositions were very concrete. We spent much time together examining how the articulate moving body\u2014or what musicians would refer to as gesture\u2014could be linked up with sensing instruments, that is, camera vision, infrared or other capture systems that \u201cobserved\u201d the dancer\u2014the gesture\u2014while, in fact, taking physical\/kinetic information from bodies to process and modulate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I speak of bodies and motion to avoid getting into much more intricate questions of how diverse movement languages and gestural forms create meaning that have particular cultural or aesthetic significance, that express or convey ideas, stories or a poetics that can be encapsulated in kinaesthetic or musical forms. I did notice in those early days that no dancers trained, say, in butoh or bharatnatyam, in classical ballet or tanztheater, took part in our experiments, though it was apparent that Cunningham or Forsythe-influenced dancers (highly technically motivated abstract movers) were more inclined to partake in interactive constellations or motion capture sessions. The role of \u201ccasting\u201d in such dance experiments deserves better attention; it made a difference if someone came from, say, a contact improvisation or new dance context, compared to being a member of a ballet or tanztheater company obliged to perform within particular repertoires and dramaturgies, thus often more hesitant, or even resistant, towards \u201caugmented reality\u201d experiments as we might call them today in the era of VR and AI. Similarly, technology-driven work was often informed by knowledge systems grounded in a privileged Western model of research, often associated with institutions supporting science\/art projects. Being friends with such networks helped to get invited. Many soloists I met in the early days were performers with close relations to musicians and video artists, at ease with sonic or filmic collaborators, hackers and later neuroscientists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A long history of screen dance that dates back many decades had also provided instances of outdoor performance, in landscapes or urban settings, proffering further insight into expanded cinema, architecture and environmental dimensions I find inextricably linked to any consideration of future roles of technology in dance. But largely it was the musicians (the \u201cdirty electronics\u201d crowd, as John Richards named it) who hooked up their instruments to analog\/digital tool kits, learnt to work with Max\/Msp and Pro Tools and pushed the boundaries. The impact sonic arts and music technology had on dance is indisputable. Alongside the evolution of research in music and dance technology, gradually visible in many parts of the world since the 1980s, we could trace a number of influential works by well-known choreographers which reflected new tendencies of collaboration underlining the connection of performing bodies and performing technologies.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I need to mention a further scenario that emerged around the turn of the century with the increasingly widespread use of Wi-Fi communications: computers and internet connectivity now allowed performers to interact through networked, distributed performance. One did not have to be in the same studio\/location anymore. Already in 2000, I was asked to join a collective of seven dance departments\/organizations in the United States, Brazil and Japan that formed ADaPT (Association for Dance and Performance Telematics).[2]<\/sup><\/a> Infrastructually, such networked performances required an enormous logistical and technical effort, setting up studios that gradually became laboratories, or \u201cIntelligent Stages\u201d (the name chosen at Arizona State University where the lab had a fully integrated mocap system installed), which housed the same or similar technical capabilities for working with multiple cameras, video-projectors, sensors, audio recording\/playback devices and computer processing software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The significance of technology-centered workshops for the trajectories of digital performance practices cannot be overestimated. One must acknowledge them and the specific laboratory conditions for experimentation they set up\u2014sometimes outside of the traditional dance, theatre, music and art schools; sometimes also within academic institutions supporting cross-over experimentation. Such conditions have been vital for the growth of digital research, along with international residencies or platforms bringing practitioners from various fields together for intense periods of experimentation, tool sharing and developing digital performance techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mentioned in the beginning my growing passion for this, and in 2003 I founded an interactive media lab in a disused coalmine in southwest Germany, just for the purpose of intermedia collaboration, testing its impact on how performance artists incorporate technologies, how the corporeal and the digital can constitute a new performance aesthetic. The \u201clanguage\u201d of new media, as Lev Manovich called the apparatus emphasizing the particular characteristics of the digital image and its relationship to earlier cinematic or photographic languages, is a language of forms which needs to be applied and tested in an evolving, co-adaptive process. But this unfolding\u2014for example, in digital microsound art or in gesturally interactive design\u2014implies re-processing of already processed data (sound signal\/biophysical feedback), tweaking the tools to fit the body and a continuous remixing and redistribution of mutating \u201ctracks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What interests me here is the performer\u2019s experience of such re-processing and tweaking.[3]<\/sup><\/a> In the telematic studio, I became aware of the dancer facing multiple screens and looking at others on screen interacting, a very visual, ocularcentric behavior if we now also include VR headsets (for example,  Oculus Quest 2). However, in sensor-driven performances with wearables\u2014so-called body-worn technologies\u2014the dancer is also \u201clistening\u201d internally to tactile as well as sonic (audio-visual) feedback, to complex multidimensional biofeedback that is nearly impossible to spell out.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ermira Goro performing the \u201cAvatar\u201d in See You in Walhalla, <\/em>2006. Photo: Interaktionslabor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Both experiences were fundamental when Interaktionslabor 2006 brought a group of nearly 20 artists to the coal mine, most of them having travelled to Germany from Greece to work on the creation of See You in Walhalla<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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