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.
This builds on inquiry explored in collaboration with Gonzalo Preciado-Azanza. The preliminary investigatory stage of developing the performance choreography was undertaken in 2020 – 22 during my artistic residency at MIT. See guest lecture: Immersed in Contemporary Dance – a guest lecture given at the Immersion Lab in Sept. 2022 Immersed in Contemporary Dance also Immersed calendar and about event
In 2023/24 the project received National Endowment for the Arts funding to support the premiere of the AR interactive performance-events along with research partnering with audiences to capture feedback aimed at development of the artistic experience of the choreography. These interactive performances involve people in two different geographic locations watching and responding to dance-choreography together in real-time. The project will link people in Detroit and Boston and Denton. Work is being done in collaboration with the Immersion Lab at MIT. This research has been supported by funding from Society for Dance Research, National Endowment for the Arts, and Texas Woman’s University. This is a DancingStrong movement lab.
Research Questions:
what does it mean artistically for dance to take advantage of the physical boundary crossing of digital space?
What creative issues still need to be addressed to create three more complete choreography experiences?
Early Process (2022-2023)
Each film can be enlarged by clicking arrows in the top left corner once the film has started
Film 1: Example of viewing and moving with choreography
This is an example of some choreography of Adesola dancing viewed through AR equipment. The dance can be engaged with anywhere using the AR glasses.
The choreography is captured as white and yellow dots. This choreography capture has not been created into a finished work, which would code the dots into trails and colors (not just dots). In this example you can also see how the AR user’s hands (and the circle dots that correspond to their hands) can move with the choreography. These would also eventually be trails with color. See Film 3 for example of trails and color.
[1.21 mins]
Film 2: Example of movement capture with some trails on points on the dancer doing the choreography (screen capture)
[0.29 mins]
Film 3: Example of a choreography with trails and color coded (experimental film)
This example is of a dance with trails marking movement but the choreography is not yet put into the AR format.
Concept, choreography, danced – Adesola Akinleye
Animator – Talis Reks
Data Analysis – Praneeth Namburi
Sound: written description of movement – Adesola Akinleye (text from Navigation: scoring the moment published by Theatrum Mundi 2022)
Music and voice – Brittany Padilla.
[2.21 mins]
The AR platform choreography does not show the body ‘type’ of the audience members or the dancer. It just captures the movement made by the dancer and each audience member within the context of the interactive performance. This means people can dance together outside of racial, social, and gendered informed categorizations. The performance experience is simply a movement response to each other inside the AR platform. The choreography exists in, through and beyond the dancers’ bodies and in the sensing experience of the physicality of the audience member. This highlights how we can use the choreography of space, dance and the digital to create a shared experience for people across different geographic locations and circumstances. For me this project is about the urgency of finding ways of being together that the arts can offer within the context of the divides of our digital age.
Also see earlier research:
Space + Digital + Dance please see the web-site SPACE+DIGITAL+DANCE work carried out in collaboration with Gonzalo Preciado-Azanza