Archive for dance graph
April 8, 2008 at 11:35 am · Filed under dance, TONY, dance graph, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, video game, aesthetics, Cavin Moore, Michel Gondry, Meghan McCoy
This is a live dance composition interface that we built in my Dance & Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College. You could also call it a video game. It uses the Wii controller to compose both dancer and viewer movement in a virtual space. This is an extended version of last years Dance Graph.
Gondry’s film and installation at Deitch Projects, Be Kind Rewind, presents a refreshing view of culture, putting value on process and participation over product and profit. Making computer games out of ourselves, our movement vocabularies and the environments we inhabit, follows this same philosophy.
“I don’t intend nor have the pretension to teach how to make films. Quite the contrary. I intend to prove that people can enjoy their time without being part of the commercial system and serving it. Ultimately, I am hoping to create a network of creativity and communication that is guaranteed to be free and independent from any commercial institution.”-Michel Gondry
moves: Cavin Moore
photo: Meghan McCoy
music: Real Nice by Should Have Thought of That
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March 8, 2007 at 12:59 am · Filed under dance event, TONY, dance graph, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, Sarah Richison, twyla tharp
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| Posted by Tony Schultz
Last month the students of the Sarah Lawrence College dance department performed Twyla Tharp’s The Fugue as the culmination of last semester’s performance project. This was done under the direction of Jennifer Way and Tom Rawe who both danced with Twyla Tharp Dance form the mid seventies to 1988. From time to time they had assistance from Sara Rudner, director of the Sarah Lawrence College dance and former Tharp dancer, and Rose Marie Wright, another former Tharp dancer and original performer of The Fugue.
The dance, originally choreographed in 1970, consists of several 20 count phrases which are recombined in spatial, temporal and logistic variation. In the spirit of The Fugue, Sarah Richison (one of our graduate students) and I created a piece of software called the Fugue Writer that generates new variations from the so-called “generic fugue material”. This choreographic interface allows the user to write their own fugue. The software enforces the restriction that only spatially continuous dances can be generated. This project was basically an interactive version of Dance Graph built around Tharp’s dance, with the added possibility of retrograde (time-reversed) movement.
Above is a picture of the interface. At the top, the lexicon of possible phrases are played. The center pull-down menu allows the user to choose possible phrases, in forward or retrograde. As new phrases are added the pull-down menu is repopulated with movement that is allowed to follow, to enforce continuity. Once the dance is written it can be played in the viewing window. During playback the current phrase is shown in the lower left of viewing window. This program is fun to play with. It definitely give me more ideas for other, more sophisticated, dance machines.
At the showing of The Fugue last month, Ginger Montel, the Associate Director of Twyla Tharp Productions, asked Sarah Richison and I to submit documentation of the Fugue Writer to the Twyla Tharp archives. Over the past month Sarah and I have been cleaning up the interface and rerecording the underlying fugue material. It has been great working on this project though both Sarah and I are glad it is over. Next week is spring break so we are ready to relax. We plan to display this work at The Joyce in May. I will keep everyone posted.
Since I do not own the intellectual property rights for The Fugue I cannot show any samples. You will just have to come see it for yourself in May. You will also be able to see the live performance. The Sarah Lawrence College dancers in this project are Hadar Ahuvia, Vivi Amranand, Laurie Benoit, Ashley Byler, Mary Chris DeBelina, Sarah Gottlieb, Alexa Hazelton, Belinda He, Moriah Mason, Jeremy Pheiffer, Ariel Pierce, Annie Rudnik, Jules Skloot and Jake Szczypek.
See you in May at The Joyce!
Recent Posts by tony schultz
February 22, 2007 at 4:02 am · Filed under TONY, science, dance graph, dance technology, sarah lawrence college
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
This week I participated in a panel discussion at Sarah Lawrence College with Kathy Westwater and Rose Anne Thom on documenting and notating dance. To be honest I was terribly nervous though once I got started talking I really enjoyed it. Kathy Westwater moderated the discussion. Rose Anne Thom talked about Laban notation and software packages Labanwriter and Labanreader, developed at Ohio State University. I primarily talked about my thesis research and how it can be applied to the problems of notating and documenting dance. My research uses computer vision algorithms to represent the body as a set of chromatic particles. Once the body is reduced to numbers it becomes possible to automatically recognize different poses. Once these landmarks are identified the computer can generate a map of the movement space in the form of a dance graph.
It was interesting to talk about my work in this context. It is in this space between dance and writing that we can get a deeper understanding about what choreography is. The word “choreography” literally means body (choreo) writing (graphy). The closely related term was coined in Thoinot Arbeau’s 1589 Orchesographie, one of the most famous dance manuals of the Renaissance. Arbeau was dance master, Jesuit priest and mathematician. Its cool to think that the project of symbolically representing dance was of interest to mathematicians over 400 years ago.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
October 10, 2006 at 10:03 am · Filed under TONY, sarah lawrence, space, cartography, dance graph, dance technology, directed, graph, maps, physics, place
| | Posted by Tony
Dance is a space craft and space is complex. Physics gives us powerful abstract representations of space that can be useful in this navigation. The trick is to exploit dimensionality to encode change and multiplicity.
At any moment the physical state of a particle can be represented by its position (where it is) and its velocity (where it is going). The 3 numbers associated with each of these quantities together form a vector, a list of 6 numbers. This vector can be thought of a single point in an abstract 6 dimensional space. By extension, the state of a 10 particle system, at any instant, can be represented by a single point in a 60 dimensional space.
What about representing the human body?
Many articulated systems are modeled this way, including proteins, robotic assemblies, and the human body. A human skeleton’s position, orientation and articulation is reasonably approximated by a single point in a 90 dimensional space. The body’s velocity, rotation and change in articulation can be represented using another 90 dimensions. Any action of the body can be represented by a point or set of points in this 180D space.
Idea 1:
At any instant, the physical state of a body can be represented by a point in a high dimensional abstract space. This is a state space.
Muscular, gravitational, structural, environmental and inertial forces accelerate the body through different states. In dancing, the body freely navigates the continuum of states, and over time, carves an extrusion of them. Back in state space, this extrusion maps to a line of connected state points. This line points forward in time; it is directed. This line has no breaks, says Zeno, since moving from one state/point to another means passing through all the states/points in between.
Idea 2:
The changing of a body’s state carves a directed path in state space. Here dancing is a form of path making, a line of flight in space.
We use maps to navigate this space. The study of dance is a kind abstract cartography. Places in space are identified and named. Standing upright is a place and the name of that place is first position. Whenever I come to first position, or move through first position, I use it as a landmark to get my bearings. I know many paths that come to that place and many paths that leave from it. It is well mapped and has many crossings.
Idea 3:
Learning to move is a form of cartography. Identifying places in state space gives us the capacity to know where we are and where we can go. We drop breadcrumbs as we dance, and like Hansel and Gretel, hope to find these crumbs again so that we might find our way.
Over the past two weeks, in my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students have been exploring this idea. We have built the computational machinery to identify points in state space and use paths of dance between these places to build a map in the form of a directed dance graph. A special program had to be built to travel this graph.
The nodes of this graph represent the named places in state space. Connecting these nodes are paths of dance represented in timecode. The player traverses the paths by taking a “random walk” along the graph. This allows the dancing to tunnel across time, to proximal paths in state space, while maintaining kinesthetic continuity. All of the cuts are made by the computer based on the random sampling of the of generated histogram of tunneling probabilities. A recording of one such walk is seen above.
We all dance in the same abstract space and collaborate in its mapping. Since no one person can inhabit all parts of this space we expand our understanding of it by reading the maps of others. This project has been going on for thousands of years and now technology can be used to advance it. Dance is a space craft and we navigate it collectively.
Algorithm: Tony Schultz
Dancers: Hadar Ahuvia, Ashley Byler, I’Nasha Crockett, Jessica Long, Erin Reck, Sarah Richison, Sarah Rosner and Lily Susskind.
Music: “Diss Location” by High Alert Status
Recent Posts by tony schultz
