Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2016

This visual essay will address several areas of research. First, it will propose that a dance experience can translate into another discipline such as visual art. In my visual art practice I combine both photography, which is traditionally seen as a still medium, and performance in order to create a new form of embodiment. By acknowledging the interrelationship between the body and the camera my project seeks to challenge a perceived separation between the disciplines. The following images were conceived through a performative somatic process, which I define in the course of this article. Through using a custom made camera I was able to negotiate time and space to create visual drawings that talk to both choreography and fine art practice.

Examining the ontology and place of digital dance within the spectrum of contemporary choreographic expression, this article proposes to consider the interweaving of interoceptive (somatic) and exteroceptive (technological) agency in a third wave of digital interfaces for dance. It argues that an ontology of digital dance might be summarily qualified as an active sensory-perceptual mode of experiencing, capable of revealing new dimensions of aesthetic reception, modes of performativity and expressions of corporeal presence in dance that emerge with/through the mediated body. It views technology not as a foreign, autonomous agency, system or simple tool, but rather as a means of stimulating heightened sensory awareness and forging relations with the individual’s somatic (inner) bodily experience. while referencing a range of recent works that establish the conditions for such experiences, it further proposes to consider how digital works develop and underscore perspective as a dramaturgical strategy and aesthetic, and as a consequence, how new media interfaces for dance can be considered ‘new viewing-sensing devices’.

This article explores the performative implications of coping with interactive performance environments, and ways in which such environments may be considered to ‘make’ people. Performers often practice for long durations in information-intensive technologized immersive settings, which demand and develop a combination of spread attentiveness, deep awareness and fast response times. This particular combination of embodied, embedded, durational and attentionally rich experience may prime the brain’s neuroplasticity – the capacity to reorganize its structure and function by forming new neural connections. This is discussed in relation to movement practices, body and self-image, and debate about technogenesis – the idea that humans are defined by their coevolution with technologies. The article considers two interactive works, Garry Stewart’s Proximity (2012) made for Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), and Crosstalk (2014), a collaborative work by artist Simon Biggs, choreographer Sue Hawksley and composer Garth Paine.

In this article we propose a biorelational framework for performance with biosensors, in which interactions are not based on causality, control, and representation, but rather, manifest through shared awareness and agency across multiple, fluid assemblies of self, other and environment. The transdisciplinary scope of this study traces trajectories from the performing and somatic arts into philosophy, biomedicine, cognitive science and human-computer interaction. A brief survey of common approaches to interaction design with biosensors will contextualize discussion of our current practice-based research and creation project, ‘Choreography and Composition of Internal Time’. In this project, we are examining temporal relationships between physiological processes, such as heart rate and breath, with rhythms in movement, music and mediated environments.

The article offers insight into somatic perspectives that have informed the design of a software application for the iPad. Entitled formXtended, the app is designed to extend the compositional imaginations of users, by engaging them in choreographic tasks that integrate movement, sound and image. The project sought to develop an approach to software design that engaged with principles of inclusion and accessibility for disabled and non-disabled users. The article offers insight into some of the questions and issues addressed by the team in their endeavour to create inclusive app-based activities. The discussion articulates how somatic principles informed both app design stage and in the testing phase with young people, which led to further refinements in the app design. The somatic dimensions of the formXtended project are situated within a larger and more complex collaboration between arts organization, dancedigital, software company, Moviestorm and research partner, University of Bedfordshire.

Shobana Jeyasingh’s [h]interland marks a pivotal moment for digital dance in the early 2000s through its use of live webcast technology. Set in Greenwich Borough Hall, less than a mile from the Prime Meridian – a vestigial signification of the British Empire’s proclamation as the centre of the world – [h]interland navigates the tensions of urban sites through a restless contemporary hybridization of bharata natyam and ballet against live and pre-recorded projections of Bangalore. Through its splintered mediations of space, time and classical movement vernaculars, I argue that [h]interland shapes a radical cosmopolitanism built from layers of otherness and contoured through the mutuality of dance forms, the migration across cities, and the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ borders between colonial locations.

Landscape of the Now: A Topography of Movement Improvisation, Kent de Spain (2014) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 189 pp., ISBN: 9780199988266, p/bk, £20.99