Although the notion of 'choreography' has not disappeared in the context of contemporary 21st Century performance and virtual art, it has certainly undergone a re-evaluation in terms of how bodily movement/physical intelligence produces data or how performers or immersants engage with an interface environment which is programmable and networked, and how environments instruct moving behaviors.
In examinations of augmented environments (and how these systems perform), a few propositions were made by Birringer and other members of the Interaktionslabor and DAP-Lab since 2006 to paraphrase the notion of the 'post choreographic' --not a new notion in itself -- to emphasize evolving systems behaviors, including physical performer articulations in constant exchange with algorithms and responsive or (semi)autonomous, intelligent audio-visual environments, sensorial flows and hypersensual spaces.
The particular challenges to thinking about 'composition' arise from the real-time synthesis of interface designs-in-motion, based not on choreography but on programming and physical adaptation, which generate “virtual movement” through the digital body-environment interaction.
A lively debate arose in February-March, first on the dance-tech list and then on Birringer's blogsite, and back to the dance-tech list. New and provocative discussions have opened up over the past weeks, and it's difficult to keep translating between list and net.
But very valuable insights are being produced, as we all grapple with the "languages" of our practices/theories, and these insights are [and need to be] saved and archived. We invite more responses from the community here to extend the discourses.
It is good that the archive of the debate continues its life here, and that -- it is to be assumed - new publications are appearing that pick up the threads, in print, and in other online and real exchanges.
I get repeated asked to comment on the debate, and the discussions that have ensued, and i hope to refer many more practitioners and performance or dance makers to it, as i am interested in how contemporary artists and programmers understand their designs and their building of systems, or their "choreographic objects."
I think with William Forsythe's recent research project, "Synchronous Objects" , the question of the post-choreographic gains another new twist. The research project, in case that is not already widely known, can be briefly summarized here as a joint project of choreographer William Forsythe and Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Department of Dance (especially Norah Zuniga Shaw), "Synchronous Objects" is an extensive and unique resource, created after "One Flat Thing, reproduced." The project aims to create a large set of data visualization tools for understanding and analyzing the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography of Forsythe's "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (2000), and this - I gather - means the construction of "choreographic objects" without the body or without the dancer(s), the construction/reconstruction of movement constellations.
These systems are quantified through the collection of data and transformed into a series of objects - synchronous objects - that work in harmony to explore those movement structures, reveal their patterns, and re-imagine what else they might look like or howelse they might be used.
I will address some of these twists in the International Choreolab at Krems Donau-Universität next week, September 8-10, 2009, Austria.
Another recent debate that offered numerous points of intersection for our discussion here was the month long internet discussion on EMPYRE (soft_skinned space) in May 2009, topic: "Critical Motion Practice" .
hello archive and repertoire? how are new threads on the post choreographic doing? I would welcome new commentaries or departure points, as the crisis in innovation is perhaps one aspect that has recently come up, another one is the emphasis on incompletion of work (in favor of iterations and prototyping and mash ups/reversions), and a third dimension clearly might the effect of the economic downturn on opportunities for sustainable dance and performance technologies research (inside and outside the academy, and art centers).
It might also be helpful to look back at the last six months of workshops/conference and international meetings, to review how themes and hot-points of debate have evolved or changed.
Talking about symposia, a Canadian friend just send me this announcement:
New Materialisms and Digital Culture:
An International Symposium on Contemporary Arts, Media and Cultural Theory
Cambridge (UK), at Anglia Ruskin University, June 21 (and 22nd) , 2010
Far from being immaterial, digital culture consists of heterogeneous bodies, relations, intensities, movements, and modes of emergence manifested in various contexts of the arts and sciences.
This event suggests "new materialism" as a speculative concept with which to rethink materiality across diverse cultural-theoretical fields of inquiry with a particular reference to digitality in/as culture: art and media studies, social and political theorising, feminist analysis, and science and technology studies.
More specifically, the event maps ways in which the questions of process, positive difference or the new, relation, and the pervasively aesthetic character of our emergences with the world have lately been taken up in cultural theory. It will engage explorations of digital culture within which matter, the body and the social, and the long-standing theoretical dominance of symbolic mediation (or the despotism of the signifier) are currently being radically reconsidered and reconceptualised.
The talks probe media arts of digital culture, sonic environments, cinematic contexts, wireless communication, philosophy of science and a variety of further topics in order to develop a new vocabulary for understanding digital culture as a material culture.
Speakers include: Dr David M. Berry, Dr Rick Dolphijn, Dr Satinder Gill, Dr Adrian Mackenzie, Dr Stamatia Portanova, Dr Anna Powell, Dr Iris van der Tuin and Dr Eleni Ikoniadou.
The academic programme will be followed by a physical computing and dance performance involving CoDE affiliated staff (Richard Hoadley and Tom Hall) along with choreographers Jane Turner, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and their dancers.
Following the symposium there will also be a short workshop for PhD students on Tuesday 22 June led by Van der Tuin and Dolphijn along with Milla Tiainen and Jussi Parikka. The aim of the workshop is to enable students to discuss and present brief intros to their work on the theme of new materialist analysis of culture and the arts with tutoring from the workshop leaders.
In addition, we are planning an informal introductory workshop for Tuesday afternoon on experimental performance and technology.
The event is sponsored by CoDE: the Cultures of the Digital Economy research institute and the Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University.
with greetings from the UK, and remembering the ashes (eyjafjallajokull)
Johannes Birringer
just for your information, the new issue of Performance Research, vol. 13 no. 1 (2008) , "On Choreography" has appeared. It is a special issue on dance and choreography, edited by Ric Allsopp and Andre Lepecki.
It has several essays and contributions regarding the impact of digital technologies on the constructions of what constitutes 'choreography'., and it includes Johannes Birringer's proposals for the "post choreographic", see: "After Choreography", pp. 118-22.
Hallo Loopos, I'm sorry but I need time to translate your questions and to think about it.
But I think it is important to differ maybe between participatory performer and the audience. But may be not.
You are interessed in interactivity and intersubjectivity. In my analytic approach - I'm not. subjective anatomy is acting only by myself but I can communicate about it with others in that/weil it is cultural appointed (by school, fotos, atlanten, pain description, medicine, physiology) but this is in a (quasi-)poetic language, an adjudgement of aesthetic quality not in a medical sense.
So, I'm interessed in a discription/analytic of body-movement/live-performance not graphic-installation. But the aesthetic quality which go out of body-anatomy/physiology is certainly also a possibility to analyse others.
Maybe, that's my answer now.
What do you means with
"i guess, no one spoke of improvisation or choreography"?
The Performer in the in the 60s?
slightly surreal, your picture of a "solo concert" , bent into its current bizarre vertical shape here, how did it get into this forum on the post-choreographic? i trust you are making an ironic commentary here, and surely it's nice hearing from you from there.
thanks for this, yes, i would also have thought that it is not so easy to compare/link performer of performance, and audience watching the performance. I didn't know what you meant by analysis instrument for a viewer (of anatomy /anatomy-based movement description), and i guess i'd had to come to your workshop to find out.
If you are not working within interactive , real time frameworks as described in the earlier posts here, then you are going back to a notion of perceivable/describable/analyzable choreography and a separation of the real time. hmm, i wonder whether there is a real time for the onlooker, in the sense in which the discussion here seemed to want to move beyond the choreographic and the capture systems. Your personally and fluidly experienced subjective movement - it is not visible then?
My joke about happenings was meant to refer to Kaprow and the unstructuring structures of events or happenings that, I guess, were never intended to be rehearsed and reproduced, and thus their event-ness in real time again differentiates them from the precision vocabulary of Forsythe, let's say, and his dancers trained in a particular "improvisation technology" (would you say within particular physiological/anatomical use of body, joints, arms, legs, rotations, reversion, etc, pulsive, architectonic, linear? what vis the vocabularyt you use.....?) that, i think, operates on the opposite end of what, say happened, in Cage's "Variations" and in some of the happenings at 9 Evenings (1966).
This is my first contribution to what is a fascinating discussion.
I would like to add that as one of the dance collaborators within Suna no Onna performative project, I find the term post-choreography entirely appropriate, particularly in light of the discussions so far. As a performing artist engaged with the real-time relationships between the metabolic processes of my physical journal (embodied memory and knowledge) and the various interactive digital processes, I am particularly interested in the perceptual distinctions between the terms ‘choreographic’ and ‘post-choreographic’.
The notions of the ‘post’ in the term post-choreographic does not abandon the structural frameworks that underpin the definitions of what in western academic discourses we call ‘choreographic’, as has been indicated in some of the points raised in the debate so far. For me this would be like discussing the post-natal while abandoning the structural nature of pregnancy (and as a father I have the distinction of being a reflective participant/observer). I do not wish to be flippant, but I just want to highlight the point that the two are linked and that the distinctions are by a matter of degree and dimension.
If we make the assumption that the formalising concepts regarding the choreographic, with its emphasis on the vision of the choreographer(s), is ‘prior’ in the Aristotelian sense, to the perspectives of the post-choreographic, then the focus will not be on the choreographers’ aesthetic vision but on the ways in which our complex network of senses and sensor technologies track and trigger the choices and events made within a collaborative process. The primary interface would be between different individuals using real-time devices to feedback information that inform the decisions made in the performances’ ‘now-time’ with respect to an improvisational process; as has been indicated already by others in the course of this debate.
I agree that some of the claims, concerning the post-choreographic label, are similar to improvisational processes found in some of our current choreographic discourses and that the liminal threshold between choice and action in ‘real time’ rely on the immediate relationship between responses from my physical journal’s sensorium and information from the performative context at any instance.
What excites me as a performer and deviser are the liminal spaces created by the dialogical relationship between all the parties involved the presence of an event.
This includes the temporal space makers, including the audio-visual content; all the performers; the audience or reflective participant and real-time technicians.
For me as a performer, the inter-subjective use of improvisational and interactivity differs slightly in this way; within a choreographic context, the structural framework of the improvisation is employed to create an aesthetic of ‘now-ness’, where my focus is to leave a 4 dimensional trace-form by making strategic choices in the potential space that is 5 dimensional (5 dimensions is defined here as an infinite number of 4 dimensional possibilities that can only exist in potential).
When I am in a post-choreographic context my predominant performative perceptions with regards to improvisation, shift from ‘goal oriented outcomes’ to ‘process oriented transformation’ with particular regards to how the audience engages with the context of my performance. I want to emphasis the word ‘pre-dominant’ as way counter any simple dualistic readings here. This slight perceptual shift takes the utility of improvisation as an aesthetic tool and moves it towards improvisation as tool that reveals and explores the liminal threshold in and of its self. The plan is to bring the audience closer to an experience of ‘potential’; a potential that always lies just posterior to a particular moment by highlighting our inter-subjective sensorium; to dilate an experience of a 5 dimensional potential that lies fractionally in front of our position, our place, our ‘now-ness’.
Subjectively I find that these distinctions are useful and interchangeable. I can use a number of different improvisational processes both in ‘devising’ and ‘performing’ when I am choreographing and performing, however when I am focusing on the fluid dynamics of an interactivity that draws an audience toward a space where the particular instance of interactivity is taking place, I find myself focused on the parameters of choice and how I present my developing artistry in the network of metabolic and digital sensors that constitute my sensorium.
firstly with Suna no Onna i think you are performing the authors aesthetic vision? there is a scenario and a desire to display real-time, embodied interactions. this is prior vision as to the (general) effect of the work. the options / choices you explore have been 'limited' by the scenography, scenario etc.
getting caught up in the notion of 'steps, phrases and ('exact' )repeatability' is a bad idea. someone decided there was going to be a work, and asked you to partake.
i'm also wondering how far (and where) you can separate improvisation practice form the notion of post-choreographic.
if you look at perception based improv it is process based (e.g. lisa nelson). only structured and stimuli based improv is goal based (tasks). and, if we accept the performative notion of liminal (i don't), improvisation is always on the threshold.
improv has 'now-ness' and the '4-d trace', except this is not a useful identifier. taking paths through a range of options / possibilities is a core improvisation concept ... but we 'effect' the 5th dimension simply by observing, even without a 'performative / compositional' focus.
good improvisation, is a utility not an aesthetic. there are many misunderstandings about improvisation and i wonder if that where the confusion around 'post-choreographic' lies.
when composing in real-time you must always look ahead, otherwise the composition falls further 'after'. when watching improv we look for these potentials and then observe the outcome.
remember, we can only follow one 5th dimensional path. we collapse the other paths by observing and acting. so yes, this is choice ... but again something we all do. it is not unique. and, if we wanted to take alternate 5-d paths we would have to move to the 6th dimension. imagining the alternatives is not the same as following them.
so ...
the threshold of potential(s) and choice (action) in improv mean we can think of it as liminal. and by its very nature the choices are made at points of interaction (others, self, media, environment, etc.). the options/choices are perceived through our senses and cognition.
given this, i feel you are describing your/an improvisation practice within a mediated / transductive environment. unless 'post-choreographic' is the new term for improv there is no new practice here.
the only place you leave for the post-choreographic is the technology itself. (remember, you are not perceiving what the sensors perceive).
beyond the human elements how does the technology interact, is the "track and trigger" really fluid or more static (goal / task orientated)?
or perhaps it is your improvisation that locates and develops the intersections and interactions? the technology simply 'responds'.
Brief trackback to your manifesto, returning us here to earlier in April, i think it's quite good to create a little archive here to and see the bits and pieces that created this puzzle of a debate.
Wed 4/2/2008 10:29 AM
From: Jeannette Ginslov
TO: dance-tech@freelists.org
Subject: Re: post / choreographic
At the risk of repeating what other dance practitioners may have already said and whether anyone is interested or not, i wish to share the following after matt's encouragement - "if the dancer(s) are co-authors at the moment of performance we need to hear from them ... directly." and "the 'freedom'
is in perception (of the performer) not the underlying code or content." and "the tendency is to use technology to re-mediate' the space. this leaves the performers with casual and patterned responses. this conditioning remains even when the code/content/outcomes change."
in my experience during performance with interactive sites, a heightened & amplified sense of focus, perception and seeing, is perhaps what occurs for me at the moment, the gap, or place of interaction.
the irony is that the more one narrows and quietens the focus on that locus of interaction, the more it amplifies the sense of awareness of perception - the five senses and awareness of self, become heightened and allows for a discursive interaction within the self, between the many selves, feelings and ideas, that come alive during performance. it gets a bit 'noisy' at times if you do not concentrate, as they tend to happen simultaneously.
for this to come alive during such performances, a sense of quietness is necessary for intense focus and listening to occur at these loci of interactivity. it is as if you have to walk through a door, squeeze and squash the mind/body binary together, so they merge, and then you are through the door into another sense of perceiving the present, real-time, perceiving and acknowledging it, all at the same time, in your entire body and being.
then during performance i am amazed at how my senses are awakened and how my body memory, that includes habit and the questioning of it, comes forward in my consciousness for the moment of negotiation or choice, to respond. as part author, should i use this or that? milliseconds float by.
an added advantage of being the performer/"enfleshed machine" immersed in the constellation of possible interactions, whether they are causal or not, is that we have an added awareness of audience. the real 'electronic'
machine does not.
the "enfleshed machine" is aware of mind and perceptual flow, seeing in real-time but also seeing shifts in perceptual flow and shifts in perspective, as if there is a constant dialogue within the performer between the different 'performative selves' - one is aware of the structure and responds accordingly, one is aware of the shifts and slight differences that occur at each performance, so cause and effect vary slightly at each performance, one is aware of mistakes and therefore new ideas and possibilities, one that is aware of audience and the desire to evoke an empathetic response in them, (if only they were you) making them as kinetically or emotionally engaged and in an excited/aware state, in that moment of connection, one that is always judging the performance as a whole within a cultural context aware of place in time and history, one that is the personal - body aches, pains, tiredness, energy levels etc, one that is aware of other interferences - extraneous noises etc
it begs the question - for whom and what is this work for? at the moment of co-authorship, it seems to be intensely personal, not for the consumption of an audience, that seems extraneous, outside of 'the moment of choice', unless the result is for the more spectacular. specularity then comes into play and alters the performer's choices.
the need to share what has actually happened at the interface between the highly skilled dancer and the machine, the myriad
Replies
I get repeated asked to comment on the debate, and the discussions that have ensued, and i hope to refer many more practitioners and performance or dance makers to it, as i am interested in how contemporary artists and programmers understand their designs and their building of systems, or their "choreographic objects."
I think with William Forsythe's recent research project, "Synchronous Objects" , the question of the post-choreographic gains another new twist. The research project, in case that is not already widely known, can be briefly summarized here as a joint project of choreographer William Forsythe and Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Department of Dance (especially Norah Zuniga Shaw), "Synchronous Objects" is an extensive and unique resource, created after "One Flat Thing, reproduced." The project aims to create a large set of data visualization tools for understanding and analyzing the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography of Forsythe's "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (2000), and this - I gather - means the construction of "choreographic objects" without the body or without the dancer(s), the construction/reconstruction of movement constellations.
These systems are quantified through the collection of data and transformed into a series of objects - synchronous objects - that work in harmony to explore those movement structures, reveal their patterns, and re-imagine what else they might look like or howelse they might be used.
I will address some of these twists in the International Choreolab at Krems Donau-Universität next week, September 8-10, 2009, Austria.
Another recent debate that offered numerous points of intersection for our discussion here was the month long internet discussion on EMPYRE (soft_skinned space) in May 2009, topic: "Critical Motion Practice" .
Johannes Birringer
It might also be helpful to look back at the last six months of workshops/conference and international meetings, to review how themes and hot-points of debate have evolved or changed.
Talking about symposia, a Canadian friend just send me this announcement:
New Materialisms and Digital Culture:
An International Symposium on Contemporary Arts, Media and Cultural Theory
Cambridge (UK), at Anglia Ruskin University, June 21 (and 22nd) , 2010
Far from being immaterial, digital culture consists of heterogeneous bodies, relations, intensities, movements, and modes of emergence manifested in various contexts of the arts and sciences.
This event suggests "new materialism" as a speculative concept with which to rethink materiality across diverse cultural-theoretical fields of inquiry with a particular reference to digitality in/as culture: art and media studies, social and political theorising, feminist analysis, and science and technology studies.
More specifically, the event maps ways in which the questions of process, positive difference or the new, relation, and the pervasively aesthetic character of our emergences with the world have lately been taken up in cultural theory. It will engage explorations of digital culture within which matter, the body and the social, and the long-standing theoretical dominance of symbolic mediation (or the despotism of the signifier) are currently being radically reconsidered and reconceptualised.
The talks probe media arts of digital culture, sonic environments, cinematic contexts, wireless communication, philosophy of science and a variety of further topics in order to develop a new vocabulary for understanding digital culture as a material culture.
Speakers include: Dr David M. Berry, Dr Rick Dolphijn, Dr Satinder Gill, Dr Adrian Mackenzie, Dr Stamatia Portanova, Dr Anna Powell, Dr Iris van der Tuin and Dr Eleni Ikoniadou.
The academic programme will be followed by a physical computing and dance performance involving CoDE affiliated staff (Richard Hoadley and Tom Hall) along with choreographers Jane Turner, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and their dancers.
Following the symposium there will also be a short workshop for PhD students on Tuesday 22 June led by Van der Tuin and Dolphijn along with Milla Tiainen and Jussi Parikka. The aim of the workshop is to enable students to discuss and present brief intros to their work on the theme of new materialist analysis of culture and the arts with tutoring from the workshop leaders.
In addition, we are planning an informal introductory workshop for Tuesday afternoon on experimental performance and technology.
The event is sponsored by CoDE: the Cultures of the Digital Economy research institute and the Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University.
with greetings from the UK, and remembering the ashes (eyjafjallajokull)
Johannes Birringer
just for your information, the new issue of Performance Research, vol. 13 no. 1 (2008) , "On Choreography" has appeared. It is a special issue on dance and choreography, edited by Ric Allsopp and Andre Lepecki.
It has several essays and contributions regarding the impact of digital technologies on the constructions of what constitutes 'choreography'., and it includes Johannes Birringer's proposals for the "post choreographic", see: "After Choreography", pp. 118-22.
But I think it is important to differ maybe between participatory performer and the audience. But may be not.
You are interessed in interactivity and intersubjectivity. In my analytic approach - I'm not. subjective anatomy is acting only by myself but I can communicate about it with others in that/weil it is cultural appointed (by school, fotos, atlanten, pain description, medicine, physiology) but this is in a (quasi-)poetic language, an adjudgement of aesthetic quality not in a medical sense.
So, I'm interessed in a discription/analytic of body-movement/live-performance not graphic-installation. But the aesthetic quality which go out of body-anatomy/physiology is certainly also a possibility to analyse others.
Maybe, that's my answer now.
What do you means with
"i guess, no one spoke of improvisation or choreography"?
The Performer in the in the 60s?
Regards and thanks for discussion.
slightly surreal, your picture of a "solo concert" , bent into its current bizarre vertical shape here, how did it get into this forum on the post-choreographic? i trust you are making an ironic commentary here, and surely it's nice hearing from you from there.
thanks for this, yes, i would also have thought that it is not so easy to compare/link performer of performance, and audience watching the performance. I didn't know what you meant by analysis instrument for a viewer (of anatomy /anatomy-based movement description), and i guess i'd had to come to your workshop to find out.
If you are not working within interactive , real time frameworks as described in the earlier posts here, then you are going back to a notion of perceivable/describable/analyzable choreography and a separation of the real time. hmm, i wonder whether there is a real time for the onlooker, in the sense in which the discussion here seemed to want to move beyond the choreographic and the capture systems. Your personally and fluidly experienced subjective movement - it is not visible then?
My joke about happenings was meant to refer to Kaprow and the unstructuring structures of events or happenings that, I guess, were never intended to be rehearsed and reproduced, and thus their event-ness in real time again differentiates them from the precision vocabulary of Forsythe, let's say, and his dancers trained in a particular "improvisation technology" (would you say within particular physiological/anatomical use of body, joints, arms, legs, rotations, reversion, etc, pulsive, architectonic, linear? what vis the vocabularyt you use.....?) that, i think, operates on the opposite end of what, say happened, in Cage's "Variations" and in some of the happenings at 9 Evenings (1966).
with regards
Loopos
This is my first contribution to what is a fascinating discussion.
I would like to add that as one of the dance collaborators within Suna no Onna performative project, I find the term post-choreography entirely appropriate, particularly in light of the discussions so far. As a performing artist engaged with the real-time relationships between the metabolic processes of my physical journal (embodied memory and knowledge) and the various interactive digital processes, I am particularly interested in the perceptual distinctions between the terms ‘choreographic’ and ‘post-choreographic’.
The notions of the ‘post’ in the term post-choreographic does not abandon the structural frameworks that underpin the definitions of what in western academic discourses we call ‘choreographic’, as has been indicated in some of the points raised in the debate so far. For me this would be like discussing the post-natal while abandoning the structural nature of pregnancy (and as a father I have the distinction of being a reflective participant/observer). I do not wish to be flippant, but I just want to highlight the point that the two are linked and that the distinctions are by a matter of degree and dimension.
If we make the assumption that the formalising concepts regarding the choreographic, with its emphasis on the vision of the choreographer(s), is ‘prior’ in the Aristotelian sense, to the perspectives of the post-choreographic, then the focus will not be on the choreographers’ aesthetic vision but on the ways in which our complex network of senses and sensor technologies track and trigger the choices and events made within a collaborative process. The primary interface would be between different individuals using real-time devices to feedback information that inform the decisions made in the performances’ ‘now-time’ with respect to an improvisational process; as has been indicated already by others in the course of this debate.
I agree that some of the claims, concerning the post-choreographic label, are similar to improvisational processes found in some of our current choreographic discourses and that the liminal threshold between choice and action in ‘real time’ rely on the immediate relationship between responses from my physical journal’s sensorium and information from the performative context at any instance.
What excites me as a performer and deviser are the liminal spaces created by the dialogical relationship between all the parties involved the presence of an event.
This includes the temporal space makers, including the audio-visual content; all the performers; the audience or reflective participant and real-time technicians.
For me as a performer, the inter-subjective use of improvisational and interactivity differs slightly in this way; within a choreographic context, the structural framework of the improvisation is employed to create an aesthetic of ‘now-ness’, where my focus is to leave a 4 dimensional trace-form by making strategic choices in the potential space that is 5 dimensional (5 dimensions is defined here as an infinite number of 4 dimensional possibilities that can only exist in potential).
When I am in a post-choreographic context my predominant performative perceptions with regards to improvisation, shift from ‘goal oriented outcomes’ to ‘process oriented transformation’ with particular regards to how the audience engages with the context of my performance. I want to emphasis the word ‘pre-dominant’ as way counter any simple dualistic readings here. This slight perceptual shift takes the utility of improvisation as an aesthetic tool and moves it towards improvisation as tool that reveals and explores the liminal threshold in and of its self. The plan is to bring the audience closer to an experience of ‘potential’; a potential that always lies just posterior to a particular moment by highlighting our inter-subjective sensorium; to dilate an experience of a 5 dimensional potential that lies fractionally in front of our position, our place, our ‘now-ness’.
Subjectively I find that these distinctions are useful and interchangeable. I can use a number of different improvisational processes both in ‘devising’ and ‘performing’ when I am choreographing and performing, however when I am focusing on the fluid dynamics of an interactivity that draws an audience toward a space where the particular instance of interactivity is taking place, I find myself focused on the parameters of choice and how I present my developing artistry in the network of metabolic and digital sensors that constitute my sensorium.
firstly with Suna no Onna i think you are performing the authors aesthetic vision? there is a scenario and a desire to display real-time, embodied interactions. this is prior vision as to the (general) effect of the work. the options / choices you explore have been 'limited' by the scenography, scenario etc.
getting caught up in the notion of 'steps, phrases and ('exact' )repeatability' is a bad idea. someone decided there was going to be a work, and asked you to partake.
i'm also wondering how far (and where) you can separate improvisation practice form the notion of post-choreographic.
if you look at perception based improv it is process based (e.g. lisa nelson). only structured and stimuli based improv is goal based (tasks). and, if we accept the performative notion of liminal (i don't), improvisation is always on the threshold.
improv has 'now-ness' and the '4-d trace', except this is not a useful identifier. taking paths through a range of options / possibilities is a core improvisation concept ... but we 'effect' the 5th dimension simply by observing, even without a 'performative / compositional' focus.
good improvisation, is a utility not an aesthetic. there are many misunderstandings about improvisation and i wonder if that where the confusion around 'post-choreographic' lies.
when composing in real-time you must always look ahead, otherwise the composition falls further 'after'. when watching improv we look for these potentials and then observe the outcome.
remember, we can only follow one 5th dimensional path. we collapse the other paths by observing and acting. so yes, this is choice ... but again something we all do. it is not unique. and, if we wanted to take alternate 5-d paths we would have to move to the 6th dimension. imagining the alternatives is not the same as following them.
so ...
the threshold of potential(s) and choice (action) in improv mean we can think of it as liminal. and by its very nature the choices are made at points of interaction (others, self, media, environment, etc.). the options/choices are perceived through our senses and cognition.
given this, i feel you are describing your/an improvisation practice within a mediated / transductive environment. unless 'post-choreographic' is the new term for improv there is no new practice here.
the only place you leave for the post-choreographic is the technology itself. (remember, you are not perceiving what the sensors perceive).
beyond the human elements how does the technology interact, is the "track and trigger" really fluid or more static (goal / task orientated)?
or perhaps it is your improvisation that locates and develops the intersections and interactions? the technology simply 'responds'.
read below
Wed 4/2/2008 10:29 AM
From: Jeannette Ginslov
TO: dance-tech@freelists.org
Subject: Re: post / choreographic
At the risk of repeating what other dance practitioners may have already said and whether anyone is interested or not, i wish to share the following after matt's encouragement - "if the dancer(s) are co-authors at the moment of performance we need to hear from them ... directly." and "the 'freedom'
is in perception (of the performer) not the underlying code or content." and "the tendency is to use technology to re-mediate' the space. this leaves the performers with casual and patterned responses. this conditioning remains even when the code/content/outcomes change."
in my experience during performance with interactive sites, a heightened & amplified sense of focus, perception and seeing, is perhaps what occurs for me at the moment, the gap, or place of interaction.
the irony is that the more one narrows and quietens the focus on that locus of interaction, the more it amplifies the sense of awareness of perception - the five senses and awareness of self, become heightened and allows for a discursive interaction within the self, between the many selves, feelings and ideas, that come alive during performance. it gets a bit 'noisy' at times if you do not concentrate, as they tend to happen simultaneously.
for this to come alive during such performances, a sense of quietness is necessary for intense focus and listening to occur at these loci of interactivity. it is as if you have to walk through a door, squeeze and squash the mind/body binary together, so they merge, and then you are through the door into another sense of perceiving the present, real-time, perceiving and acknowledging it, all at the same time, in your entire body and being.
then during performance i am amazed at how my senses are awakened and how my body memory, that includes habit and the questioning of it, comes forward in my consciousness for the moment of negotiation or choice, to respond. as part author, should i use this or that? milliseconds float by.
an added advantage of being the performer/"enfleshed machine" immersed in the constellation of possible interactions, whether they are causal or not, is that we have an added awareness of audience. the real 'electronic'
machine does not.
the "enfleshed machine" is aware of mind and perceptual flow, seeing in real-time but also seeing shifts in perceptual flow and shifts in perspective, as if there is a constant dialogue within the performer between the different 'performative selves' - one is aware of the structure and responds accordingly, one is aware of the shifts and slight differences that occur at each performance, so cause and effect vary slightly at each performance, one is aware of mistakes and therefore new ideas and possibilities, one that is aware of audience and the desire to evoke an empathetic response in them, (if only they were you) making them as kinetically or emotionally engaged and in an excited/aware state, in that moment of connection, one that is always judging the performance as a whole within a cultural context aware of place in time and history, one that is the personal - body aches, pains, tiredness, energy levels etc, one that is aware of other interferences - extraneous noises etc
it begs the question - for whom and what is this work for? at the moment of co-authorship, it seems to be intensely personal, not for the consumption of an audience, that seems extraneous, outside of 'the moment of choice', unless the result is for the more spectacular. specularity then comes into play and alters the performer's choices.
the need to share what has actually happened at the interface between the highly skilled dancer and the machine, the myriad
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next