Dance and the Digital

Space+Dance+Digital

Space+Dance+Digital

Space+Dance+Digital (S+D2) is a dance project creating choreography accessed through the immersive digital platform of Augmented Reality (AR). AR allows the dance performance to be experienced, shared, and responded to through people digitally coming together across geographic, political, language, and social barriers.

Also see the page for S+D2  

Funding support for this project includes the below, thank you: 

The National Endowment for the Arts (2023/24)

The Greater Denton Arts Council (2023)

The Ivor Guest Research Grant, Society for Dance Research (2022) 

Posted by Adesola in Dance and the Digital

IMMERSED in Contemporary Dance, MIT

IMMERSED in Contemporary Dance, MIT

In the Immersion Lab, Dr. Akinleye has been tracking movement in space without capturing the dancer’s body shape. This creates an artwork of ‘pure movement’ without many of the social and political constructs that seeing the body that is producing the movement would impose on the meaning of the movement. This work also allows the AR audience member to step into the movement, be present in and contribute to the choreography. Her research explores collaborative place-making and new ways of artistic and political togetherness through the digital and the dance space.

Link to MIT page IMMERSED in…

Posted by Adesola in Dance and the Digital

Episode 137 | Dance & Augmented Reality: Dr. Adesola Akinleye, DancingStrong Movement Lab

Episode 137 | Dance & Augmented Reality: Dr. Adesola Akinleye, DancingStrong Movement Lab

kNOwBOX Pod Cast (Episode 137)

kNOwBOX dance is a female-founded digital dance company co-created in 2018 by Martheya Nygaard and YeaJean Choi.

In this episode, Dr. Adesola Akinleye, an interdisciplinary dancer and choreographer artist-scholar, joins Martheya to talk about Dance and Augmented Reality. They discuss spatial practices, perceived borders, and DancingStrong Movement Lab. (41:43) 

Posted by Adesola in Dance and the Digital, Podcasts

Archiving with Bare Feet: Truth & Transparency (2024 digital archive)

Archiving with Bare Feet: Truth & Transparency (2024 digital archive)

Archiving with Bare Feet

This is a digital archive that documents the choreographic process, Climbing with Bare Feet, and the 2007 performance that came from it: Truth & Transparency. Commissioned by Siobhan Davies Studios.

Truth & Transparency is a choreography for two performers and one dancer who manipulates an image projected onto the stage using a mirror. The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and Adesola’s reflections on bringing-up their own children as two Black youth. The piece researched Step and Crumping dance forms, and foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and space.

Archiving with Bare Feet takes up the challenge of archiving artistic process, from Adesola’s perspective as a Black, female presenting, choreographer – a perspective which placed them outside the British dance mainstream in 2007. Collating various materials – footage, reflections, restagings – the archive reflects on what happens to the work of a dancer or a choreographer when it is/they are archived. Instead of presenting choreographic work as something that lives outside of a particular time; this archive understands it as living, existing through ongoing processes and the artistic knowledge it generates.

Posted by Adesola in Artworks, Dance and the Digital

The Distance of Education

The Distance of Education

I contribute Chapter 10 in Futures of Performance: The Responsibility of Performing Arts in Higher Education, edited by Karen Schupp.

The 2020/21 COVID-19 pandemic wrenched arts education onto the Zoom screen, but after my 12 years of teaching online with performance arts students, I suggest the online learning space offers more than just temporary replacements for in-person classes. In this chapter, I use the distance-education course I wrote/co-wrote and directed/co-directed for 12.5 years as a case study. The strangeness of “teaching” performance artists through an online course was often at odds with the main body of the university. However, the use of online mediums to educate was not to replace the physicality of being together familiar to a traditional construction of university. Rather it allowed students to practice arts around the world in early career settings, such as apprenticeships in touring companies. The courses utilized the Internet and distance education to create a performing arts pedagogical framing drawing on network theory and connectivism. I conclude the chapter by suggesting the embodied, creative knowledges of the performing arts have much to offer general pedagogical responses to the digital world of the 21st century.

Link to publisher 

Futures of Performance edited by Karen Schupp, inspires both current and future artists/academics to reflect on their roles and responsibilities in igniting future-forward thinking and practices for the performing arts in higher education.

The book presents a breadth of new perspectives from the disciplines of music, dance, theatre, and mediated performance and from a range of institutional contexts. Chapters from teachers across various contexts of higher education are organized according to the three main areas of responsibilities of performing arts education: to academia, to society, and to the field as a whole. With the intention of illuminating the intricacy of how performing arts are situated and function in higher education, the book addresses key questions including: How are the performing arts valued in higher education? How are programs addressing equity? What responsibilities do performing arts programs have to stakeholders inside and outside of the academy? What are programs’ ethical obligations to students and how are those met? Futures of Performance examines these questions and offers models that can give us some of the potential answers.

This is a crucial and timely resource for anyone in a decision-making position within the university performing arts sector, from administrators, to educators, to those in leadership positions.

Table of Contents

Section 1: Responsibilities to Academia

Introduction – Karen Schupp

Performance Across the Disciplines: Envisioning Transdisciplinary Performance Pedagogies in Postsecondary Education – Jesse Katen

Ethics, Standards, Evaluation, and Support of Creative Research in Academia – Ali Duffy, Isabella Gonzales, and Destanie Davidson Preston

Ugly Feelings and Social Justice: Interrupting Inaction in Times of Perpetual Crisis – Lauren Kapalka Richerme

Hosting Co(n)fusion: Art Residencies as Invitation-Practices – Janaína Moraes

Decolonizing Tertiary Dance Education Through Including Student Voices in a Curricula Change Project – Camilla Reppen, Lovisa Lundgren, and Tone Pernille Østern

The Creative Spaces at HBCUs – Avis HatcherPuzzo, Soni Martin, Denise Murchison Payton, and Amanda Virelles

Call of the Butterfly: The Tao of Genuine Generosity – Robert Farid Karimi

 

Section 2: Responsibilities to the Fields

Introduction – Karen Schupp

The Distance of Education – Adesola Akinleye

Performing Hartford: A Community Turns its Head – Rebecca K. Pappas

Integrating Disciplines–Disciplining Integration: Opera Curriculum through a Transdisciplinary Counter-Critical Pedagogy – Kevin Skelton

Sustainable Futures in Performance Practice, Production, and Distribution Ecologies – Max Zara Bernstein

Fighting for Equity With(in) Parasitical Resistance – Jessica Rajko

A Tertiary Music Performance Education Through a Lens of Entrepreneurship – Deanna Swoboda

“Undervalued, Underpaid, Underappreciated”: The Lived Experiences of Adjunct Faculty in the Performing Arts. – Karen Schupp, Artemis Preeshl, and Joya Scott

 

Section 3: Responsibilities to Society

Introduction – Karen Schupp

Performing Arts Education for Democracies: Are We Cultivating Citizens or Docile Laborers? – Robin Raven Prichard

Revitalizing the US Baccalaureate Dance Major: Integrating Values of Diversity and Interdisciplinarity – Sherrie Barr and Wendy Oliver

Interrogating the Academy’s Role in the Journey from Art Music to Heart Music – Fiona Evison

Toward a Pedagogy of Care: Well-being, Grief, and Community-based Theatre’s Role in Higher Education – Rivka Eckert

Arts Education in Community Colleges: A Critical Connection – Amy C. Parks

Pedagogies of Critical Embodiment: Activating Submerged Histories, Moving Toward Anti-Racist Futures – Dasha A. Chapman

The Performing Arts in the Next America: Preparing Students for Their Future – Peter Witte

Posted by Adesola in Chapters, Dance and the Digital

Royal Institute of British Architects film commissions 2021

Royal Institute of British Architects film commissions 2021

Link to film on RIBA channel

 

How do we remember as a society: whispered memory.

How do we remember as a society: pieces of me (in you) 

How do we remember as a society: catching a memory  (published by RIBA on Instagram only)

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has commissioned the artist, scholar and choreographer Adesola Akinleye to create a series of new video artworks inspired by the work of Sir David Adjaye OBE as part of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal celebrations. The videos are now available to watch on the RIBA Youtube channel.

Akinleye’s pieces respond to a prevalent theme throughout Adjaye’s practice, that of memory, through videos that convey how memories of specific places keep us connected to the sites that we have been physically separated from during the pandemic. The videos invite viewers to be fully present in a cathartic experience that will temporarily take you outside of yourself to share in Akinleye’s multilayered assemblage of memories.

Akinleye recollects a number of sites that remain important to her and therefore form part of her identity despite their distance from the location of her home. She remembers the presence of her body in different places and conveys this through a layering of imagery, movement and sound that playfully celebrates the glitch in the Zoom background algorithm. Shot entirely at home, Akinleye reflects on the past year of isolation within the confines of our domestic interiors, and suggests recognising shared experiences of specific buildings can form a collective memory that holds us together as a society.

About the Royal Gold Medal
The Royal Gold Medal has been awarded annually since 1848 and is recognized as the UK’s highest honour for architecture. The award is approved personally by Her Majesty The Queen and is given to a person or group of people who have had a significant influence “either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture.” The 2021 recipient of the award is Sir David Adjaye OBE.

Posted by Adesola in Artworks, Dance and the Digital

Dancing the Digital Age: a survey of the new technologies in the choreographic process

Dancing the Digital Age: a survey of the new technologies in the choreographic process

– authored with Gonzalo Preciado-Azanza published in Journal of Genius and Eminence

Citation: Preciado-Azanza, G & Akinleye, A. (2020). Dancing the Digital Age: a survey of the new technologies in the choreographic process. Journal of Genius and Eminence, vol 5, pp. 37-52

Abstract: This article considers fifty-eight selected dance works created during the time period of 2000-2018. In doing so the work of renown artists Wayne McGregor, Garry Stewart, Dawn Stopiello and Bill T. Jones have been used as case studies to highlight how the eminence of these choreographers has engaged dance as a meeting point and merging point for humanity and ‘New technology’. The article reviews the impact of new technologies as an essential tool in the creative processes of dance and exploration of the moving-body. Innovative technologies in the 21st Century have offered choreographers new capacities for the creation of movement. These explorations into the performance space advance insights into broader questions of the human body at the intersection of arts and science. The choreographers’ exploration of the dancing form cultivates questions about how the human body extends, begins, ends and is present. As the digital age proposes new ways to (re)imagine the communication and impact of the human body we suggest these artistic collaborations also offer insights into commonalities and places of exchange across notions of art versus science. These choreographers inter-disciplinary artistic endeavors, into how the moving body transacts and is harnessed as a mode of expression reveal deeper possibilities of the ontology of the lived-experience.

Keywords: choreography, collaboration, dance, digital age, new technology, Place 

 

 

JOURNAL OF GENIUS AND EMINENCE, 5 (1) 2020

Article 4 | pages 3752

Issue Copyright © 2020 Tinkr

Article Copyright © 2020 Gonzalo Preciado-Azanza & Dr. Adesola Akinleye

ISSN: 2334-1149 online

DOI: 10.18536/jge.2020.01.04

Posted by Adesola in Articles, Dance and the Digital

Between the Land and the Sea: rebuilding Margate’s lido

Between the Land and the Sea: rebuilding Margate’s lido

Between the Land and the Sea: rebuilding Margate’s lido takes the form of a three-channel video installation about the lived tactile history of Margate’s Lido. In making ‘Between the Land and the Sea…’ I was interested in bridging the space between the film watcher and the screen on which the film is made visible through the colour, texture, movement, and sound of the film projection itself. In the making of the film I have therefore been looking at how film exists in the space between body (who is observer) and structure (that makes it observable). I have been asking if film lives in-between these. In exploring how the story/experience of film manifests in the space between screen and eye, film can become a work of art communicating the felt rather than documentation of it.

Posted by Adesola in Dance and the Digital

Desire Lines (Choreographing the City)

Desire Lines (Choreographing the City)

Installation performance-paper at The Lowery, Salford (Re:generations Conference) – November 2019 

Desire Lines is an on-going live work. Research and develop of Desire Lines is discussed in my monograph Dance, Architecture and Engineering 

A Dance to be made: Desire Lines

My reflections on Lingering in Dwelling/Residing in Wandering form as choreography. My choreographic notes for making a piece call Desire lines, about Lingering in Dwelling Residing in Wandering are two poems and a technical performance structure. Choreographically, I think about the aim to create moments where the dancers and audience can wander new perspectives: join the current of one rhythm, then slip into another, experience simultaneous layers that complete each other through their incompleteness.

The technical structure for performance: This creates a performance space that reaches beyond itself to the audience. Four lights one in each corner (two blue two orange, where they spill onto each other they also create purple). Two projectors each attached to its own Isadora programme. When you step into this space your bodily presence creates multiple relationships through shadow, captured image, projected image, physical body. The choreography plays with the layering of relationships. In the centre of the performance space are three small piles of stones.  

The poems for choreography development:

 

Desire Lines 1 (poem to be danced)

My body is an archive of everything I’ve touched, every relationship made. The walls of this city are in my blood as I melt into them. Take my place as unknowable “Black woman in the crowd’.

My body is the archive of “Saartjie on display”, of the astonishing, stranger that crowds the streets. I dissolve into the heat of the city, complexly sweet and invisible as Tate and Lyle’s sugar.

My body is documented by a thousand cameras a day. City vigilance that controls my non-presence that makes sure I appear only where I can be captured.

My body fragments into a million gigabytes and my femininity is made real by the stare of the security guard, visibility in the light of the pixel. I am coded into acknowledgment: data that says my Blackness was there.

(page 74, Dance, Architecture and Engineering)  

 

 

Desire Lines 2 (poem for dance)

The way we walk through the streets leaks into the future of the cities we construct,

Foretelling the possibilities of who we can move into being. 

                                     

‘As the city limits’ the walls etch identities –  

Belonging becomes entangled with the privilege of Being.

Being becomes entangled with the privilege of Belonging 

 

The poetics of my body is a terrain of muscles, bone, sinew, resistance, and tolerance,

In community with the slices of ‘otherness’ we move through.

 

 

Navigations (poem for dance)

And she would make utterances that silently shook the buildings,

changed the sky,

pulled the air into the corners of her world.

Listen, Walk, Disappear.

Magic crisscrossed patterns of diasporic, classed, unspoken vulnerability

her heart beat into histories.

The empty spaces her absents left revealed more than they concealed.

 

(pages 97 -98, Dance Architecture and Engineering)  

Posted by Adesola in Artworks, Dance and the Digital

Passing: I right my own story

Passing: I right my own story
In this work, I used digital tools in the choreographic process and in its performance. This continues four years of my use of incorporated modified projections including through the use of the Isadora Program.  This performance was a restaging at Middlesex University or the original work I created for Wayne State University, Dancers. 
Posted by Adesola in Dance and the Digital