Motion Bank: Two

Re-imagining Choreographic Ideas

Posts from the “Duet” Category

A Few Questions and Responses

Posted on November 27th, 2013

Meta Academy compilation of images

Meta Academy compilation of images

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of talking with Nik Haffner, Marlon Barrios-Solano and their students at the Inter-University for Dance Berlin (HZT Berlin) about our TWO project and the upcoming Motion Bank launch in Frankfurt. The students talked about the connection between dance and technology and asked how I came to work in this field of research. It reminded me how little I think of all this as “technology” and how much I orient around the human collaboration aspects of our work. It is the relationship between computing ideas and choreographic ideas that so defines my research in the last couple of decades. And it is the engagement between the culture of art and the culture of science that has become our true methodological space. Interdisciplinary work is intercultural work.

Here are a few more of the questions from the students and my responses:

 

What is the TWO project? Is it two different scores for two artists?
The TWO project is ONE digital score focusing on the thinking body and dancing mind (a phrase I am borrowing with permission from the illustrious David Gere and his Introduction to Taken by Surprise, an excellent compilation of articles on dance improvisation). So it is one project. One Score. Two artists. In some writing I did for the project I recently explained it like this:

Our work begins and ends with two dance companies. Unrelated to each other. One from the US (the Bebe Miller Company) and one from Europe (Thomas Hauert’s Zoo Company). Both are currently choreographing improvisation for performance. And both are engaging directly with the nature of human consciousness. When we watch the dancers, we are watching them at work. We are witness to the concentration and forms of attention that they bring to the moment. And we are witness to their habits, tendencies, attention, impulses, and memories in action. In this project, we have selected two working strategies each from the two companies to shed light on and bring us into a direct encounter with what the dancing mind and the thinking body. In an early storyboard for the project I called it The Dance of Attention but that was actually too limiting.

 

How were the artists for Motion Bank chosen?

For our part it was very intuitive really. We wanted to start from a different place then we had started with Synchronous Objects. We decided to start from a choreographic phenomenon and then look into the processes of two different artists to see what insights their ways of working might shed on that phenomenon. We were looking for people we could enjoy working with who also had a relationship to deep process and had some small-scale works (2 or 3 dancers). Bebe Miller was a natural fit because she was engaged in a duet project with her company and we knew a lot about her working methods. We found Thomas Hauert’s work through our friends at Germany’s hidden gem, the PACT Zollverein Center for Choreographic Research. PACT helped support our work by funding a residency for me and Thomas to exchange ideas and everything just unfolded from there. I immediately appreciated Thomas’ sense of processes that generate movement and his interest in the cognitive challenges that improvisation can involve.

 

Did you make everything you planned to make? Will you share the data so other things can be made from your resources?

Deadlines always mean something gets cut and that’s certainly the case with us. At some point you have to “put the show on the stage and turn on the lights.” We hope to add a few more animations and graphs in the coming months but what is online is a full representation of the project. We would love to share the data from this project and Synchronous Objects any time there is interest. Motion Bank is a kind of open source initiative. When Forsythe dreamed it up he really wanted it to act as a catalyst for other artists to explore digital scores and traces of choreographic thinking and to make tools that can be used by all kinds of artists for even more projects. I think the Piecemaker tool they created is super useful and the publishing system for the scores. And I hope the ideas are too.

 

Can you share more about the scores and ideas you selected from Bebe Miller and Thomas Hauert to discuss perception/cognition?

While the two dance companies we are focusing on are both interested in the forms of perception and consciousness accessed and enacted in improvisation, they explore those questions with very different strategies. We focus on four of those strategies in the sets you’ll see in Motion Bank at the launch on Thursday. The project is divided into four sets with the following titles: Habit, Tendency, Impulse, and Memory. I look forward to having it out in the world and knowing what ideas, questions, critiques, interests it brings.

—Norah

Screen shot from our Motion Bank project TWO that will be online November 28th

 

Dancer Awareness

Posted on July 16th, 2012

In response to our post Broader Notions of Two, Amsterdam-based dancer and researcher Bertha Bermudez wrote this very thoughtful reply:   “I keep thinking on what you wrote about two-ness in relation to time, space, social relations and the first main word I keeep thinking of is awareness. The act of reflection that is implied when dancing is, for me, the trigger of many of the forms of two-ness you are describing. When executing an action we are constantly busy with the path of it, or its evolution. Such a state needs of our attention to be placed on past events while executing new ones. Our present is a constant relationship between past experiences and their outcomes: potentials. We are then always split into…

Broader Notions of Two

Posted on June 12th, 2012

We started this project with an interest in working at a smaller scale then our previous project and focusing on choreographic ideas as they unfold between two people in the duet form. This was a natural link to Bebe Miller’s new work “A History” which focuses on the choreographic relationship between her and two of her dancers, Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones, over several years and their individual and collective movement histories.   As we delved into this we became less concerned with the nature of the duet per se and instead were drawn into the different movement identities, tensions, and synergies that dancers and choreographers negotiate within their own bodies and with and between each other. This is particularly evident because we are involved…

Allowing for the Unknown

Posted on March 28th, 2012

Beginnings are messy. We deliberately start by not knowing in order to allow our research to emerge from the materials at hand. Beginnings are messy because we entertain all input, listen and watch, listen and watch and take in, and listen and watch, and gather multiple perspectives. Nothing is outside the boundaries in the beginning. Beginnings are messy. We deliberately start by not knowing in order to move into new spaces and encounter the unfamiliar. We are in the beginning now of a new project. The boundaries are defined only slightly. We know our concerns are choreographic. We know we are interested in bringing forth choreographic ideas through the mediums we have at hand animation, video, computer graphics, data, and code. We are beginning…