Blogs

Critical Movement Practice on Empyre

Posted by Ashley on May 5, 2009 at 7:46pm
Everyone should check out -empyre- on "Critical Movement Practice" this month. Guests include Stamatia Portanova, Johannes Birringer, Laura Cull, Sarah Drury, Erin Manning, Nora Zuniga Shaw, Stelarc and myself. Click here to join in the discussion!Below is my introductory post:Hello everyone! What an exciting opportunity to engage with thistopic, Critical Movement Practice in such an open forum and for such agenerous period of time. I do hope that many people from manyperspectives get involved in what I am sure will prove to be aninteresting discussion. To start things off I will share some thoughtson my artistic work and academic scholarship, if you will allow me totemporarily bifurcate these two inseparable aspects of my career. As achoreographer who has a particular interest in digital media, Iexplore real-time dancer/audience interactions with digitalperformance technologies including live video motion tracking andmotion tracking sensors. My work with this technology has led me toquestion how digitally facilitated movements impact our physicalawareness and stand relative to dance history. As a femalechoreographer, I find relationships between dance history and digitaltechnologies particularly important as I consider social relationsthat might instantiate a classically masculinized audience gaze.Projection screens, for example, can hang to segment a stage,consequently obstructing the audience’s view. This can empower adancer to appear and disappear, or join the audience in watchingprojected images. The performer can transcribe the space betweenaudience members, screen and projection thereby destabilizing anotherwise objectifying gaze. Doesn’t this seems like such a simpleanswer to an audience/dancer relationship that choreographers haveworked to deconstruct for decades?! Even with the introduction of adestabilizing projection, though, the relationship remains morecomplicated.In order to consider examples of how our everyday movements andtechnologies can both inspire and complicate dance choreography, Ioften turn to my experiences as an audience member, choreographer,performer and theorist as one moving/thinking body to complicate ahistorical situation of dance history alongside technology. Byconsidering my experience as an audience member and in thechoreographic and performance process, I hope to clarify whether ornot digital projection and presence can open the gaze and defuse thesubsequent objectification of a dancer. In doing so, I explore howdigital technologies can inspire and re-open my conceptions of whatchoreographing corporeal technology can be, or is. This research alsooften consists of philosophical perspectives ranging fromphenomenological to deconstructionist to historiographical standpointsamong others. As we write about critical movement practice I hope thatwe can think not only about questions surrounding the danceperformance space, that we think also about how we write theory thatspeaks to, or is movement and practice movement that speaks to, or istheory.
E-mail me when people leave their comments –
Follow

You need to be a member of dance-tech to add comments!

Join dance-tech

Latest Blog Posts

Most Popular Blog Posts

Blog Topics by Tags

Monthly Archives