Dance, Space and Place | WING014
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| 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
