Archive for project
July 16, 2008 at 9:50 pm · Filed under dance, project, candice thompson, CANDICE, chris wheeldon
A regular Wednesday pit stop for me is the Spandex House, if I have not already been there every other day of the week searching for something essential; new colors for LOLAstretch or specialty spandex for costumes. Today I was swatching some fabric for a new Christopher Wheeldon ballet, for which I have been contracted to make some unitards. I am so excited about this new project and hope at some point I get to meet my fellow winger!
If you have never been there, here is the thing–there is just so much to choose from…..there are two floors that are literally overflowing and often difficult to navigate in a skirt. Does anyone remember when Project Runway went there last season for the girls wrestling challenge? And before that, the ice-skating challenge? And of course there was swimwear. Those episodes often made me feel like “hey, I should be on this show!” since stretch is my area of expertise and most often overlooked by fashion designers. There seems to be a gaping hole there, but if I were to fill it, it would mean I would definitely need to brush up on my tailoring tweeds and mens suiting skills:-)
Speaking of Project Runway, it is starting again tonight! Yay! Do you think there will be a ballet costume challenge this time? So far it seems to be the vital task they have been avoiding……
Recent Posts by candice thompson
January 23, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under dance, guest, TONY, dance technology, interactive, research, sarah lawrence college, students, education, dance teacher, performance, project, choreography, discipline, pedagogy, process, learning, intelligence, fun, dance criticism, dance lesson, social network, improvisation, Julie Cruse, VICKI, choreobot
For the last meeting of my class last semester, 12-21-07, I had Julie Cruse of Ohio State’s EMMA Lab as a guest to share her research in developing Chorebot VICKI. VICKI stands for Virtual Improvisational Choreographer / Kinetic Instructor. She a virtual automaton who guides a dancer through a structured improvisation using randomly generated verbal cues. Upon initializing VICKI she describes her purpose.
She says:
Choreobot is designed to challenge a dancer’s movement skills, and asks the dancer to draw upon advanced improvisational interpretation. I am programmed to make dances using theme and variation as prescribed by my creator. I use textbook dance methods, but - I am unpredictable. The dancer will demonstrate as I begin my next new dance.
Read more of Julie’s description of the technology HERE at the project website.
Before the lecture demonstration Julie and I had to rebuild modules of the assembly so that we could get VICKI to talk off Intel-based Macs. Retooling software under time constraints can be terribly stressful but I am glad to report we patched things up in time for the class. Julie’s lecture/demonstration was wonderful. She took some time to explain her impetus for building the machine and gave the students a tour of VICKI’s inner workings. Next Julie fired up the choreobot and demonstrated how she danced under VICKI’s instruction. Next she invited the students to try. Watching the student’s improvisation was exciting.
The system forces the dancer to think on their toes and make quick decisions. With time I could see a dancer becoming expert at navigating in this environment. Julie has clearly taken the time to do this. For her it was the first time she was able to observe other people dancing inside her system. By the end of the class everyone was incredibly energized and immersed in conversation regarding future research using choreobot VICKI. Julie has left us with a copy of VICKI and has encouraged us to continue experimenting with and mutating the system.
Matt Gough has taken a good deal of time developing an analysis of this work. In particular Matt takes issue with the description of the work as an “artificial intelligence” simply seeing it as an automated version of Cunningham’s method of chance procedures. Julie has documented the critical discourse HERE.
I met Julie inside Sector 9 of the blogosphere. There she has made bold gestures regarding dance-technology as a field. Like Matt Gough, she has voiced discontent over the current state of dance-tech.
She writes:
When I hear dance and tech, I think - it better not be ANOTHER interactive audio/video environment. It better not be ANOTHER…
…dance contextualized by projected videos
…dancer controlled by robotics or sensors improvisation in real time that composes the score
…motion capture in real time translated to animated projections
…wearable technologies that do something with sound or video
…animated avatars in second life real time “telematic” improvising
I find such pugilistic remarks invigorating and am excited to see what trouble Julie stirs up in the future.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
July 9, 2007 at 6:40 pm · Filed under SLOAN, dance, travel, video, project, mobile, peter martins, kyra nichols, target, iphone
Posted by Sloan | via mobile phone
With 10 minutes to spare.
Recent Posts by kristin sloan
July 9, 2007 at 3:02 am · Filed under SLOAN, dance, video, art, project, mobile, hermes, gallery, gerard uferas, photographer, exhibit
Posted by Sloan | via mobile phone
Recent Posts by kristin sloan
May 14, 2007 at 2:56 pm · Filed under video, TONY, sarah lawrence college, Sarah Richison, twyla tharp, project, new york dance
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
This past Sunday the Sarah Lawrence dance department participated in College Showcase: Works by Tharp, at the Joyce. The project brought together dancers from five New York colleges to perform works by Twyla Tharp. The picture above was taken during the Sarah Lawrence tech rehearsal using a slow exposure to capture the movement.
Barnard College, Eight Jelly Rolls (Jelly Roll Morton)
Hunter College, Country Dances - Excerpt (Traditional American)
The Julliard School, Deuce Coupe - Excerpt (The Beach Boys)
Marymount Manhattan College, The Fugue
Sarah Lawrence College, The Fugue (lecture demonstration)
This was a fun project to be a part of. Read the New York Times review here. Sarah Richison and I presented a video from a computational project we had been working on. I describe this project in a previous post. The video was shown in the lobby as the audience entered. It looked good on their fancy HD screen and I was happy that Sarah and I had re-shot all the footage to make everything look as crisp and clean as possible. Unfortunately I didn’t post about my showing beforehand since it was unclear, up until the last minute, whether we would be able to show the work. Intellectual property issues clouded things and the work had to be renamed Dancing Markov Networks. I didn’t mind the change however since it gave a more scientific description of what the project actually was.
Earlier in the week Sarah and I had the pleasure of presenting our project at the Joyce Soho during the last part of a Dance Talks presentation by noted dance historian and critic Marcia Siegal. Talking with Marcia Siegal was an honor and a pleasure. She is an incredibly accomplish writer, academic and thinker in the field of dance and dance studies. We were a bit star struck. Sarah even brought one of her books for Marcia to sign. It was great to talk about our work with such an engaged audience. I definitely hope to keep in touch with Marcia Siegel in the future. She had a great enthusiasm for exploring ideas about dance through computational methods. It always feels good when people take genuine interest in your work.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
May 13, 2007 at 7:58 pm · Filed under dance, dance event, dancers, friends, TONY, science, space, sarah lawrence college, choreographer, performance, community, project, sara rudner, process
Posted by Tony Schultz
Happy mother’s day! Today my dance-mom, Sara Rudner, is presenting an afternoon of music and dance in Dancing-On-View (Preview/Hindsight) at the Baryshnikov Art Center from 5 - 9 PM. Sara describes the work as a “marathon installation in non-theatrical time and space in a celebration of dance and dancers. The audience, free to come and go throughout the event, is invited to stand or sit, and determine the length of the experience.” I went to an open rehearsal this past Wednesday. Tonya Plank went this past Friday. Her account of the work can be read here.
Sara invited me to a rehearsal of the project back in March. The work, first shown in 1975, presents dance as a practice more than a performance. For Sara moving is something worth doing more than seeing. In this way the rehearsal has as much meaning as the final performance. I felt joy in knowing many of the dancers. The dancers included Rocky Bornstein (Kristin’s physical therapist), Megan Boyd, Linda Cohen, Erin Cornell, Erin Crawley-Woods, Laurel Dugan (who I have introduced to you before), Maria Earle (friend and former graduate student of history with my mother Priscilla Murolo) , Liz Filbrun, Peggy Gould (Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty), Anneke Hansen, Patricia Hoffbauer, Rachel Lehrer, Merceditas Manago-Alexander (Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty), Sara Rudner, Vicky Shick (who presented Plum House at DTW), Maggie Thom (daughter of Rose Anne Thom, Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty) and Lori Yuill.
At the March rehearsal Sara Rudner had been kind enough to explain to me some of the compositional processes going on in the work. Much of the choreography is manifest through performing variational operations on phrases of movement. These compositional variations can be considered as transformational mappings of movement in both space and time. Reversal, for example, maps the right side of the body to the left side of the body. This can be thought of as reflecting movement across the sagittal plane of the body. Inversion generally maps the front side of the body to the back side of the body, in effect,a reflection of movement across the frontal plane of the body. Retrograding a phrase of movement runs it backwards in time, creating a reflection across the time axis. Many more kinds of operations can be used to transform movement, including moving it in space (translation) and changing the facing (rotation).
As Sara described these techniques I was struck how theories of physics used these same ideas. When physicists build theories of the world they characterize these theories by their symmetries in space and time. For example, to theorize the behavior of particles we want that behavior to be independent of where we perform the measurement. Smashing two electrons together should have the same effect so matter if we do it here or there. This is called translational invariance. The effect should also be independent of how our system is oriented in space. This is called rotational invariance or isotropy. The symmetry of a system in mapping right to left and left to right (as Alice does as she goes through the looking glass) is called parity invariance. For simple particle theories reversing a physical system in time yields another physically realizable system. This is called time-reversal symmetry.
The lesson in this way of thinking is that when we know a dance we automatically know all of the dances that can be manifested from this dance through these variational techniques. In physics we know that for a theory to be “good” its mathematics must obey the same symmetries that we observe in the physical phenomenon we are trying to characterize.
In watching the rehearsal/performance of Dancing-On-View one is struck by great deal of thinking being done by the dancers. This recasts the dancing (female) body as no longer just an object to be studied but as the site of the production of knowledge. Sara Rudner’s work and creative approach invites one to see dance as a research practice very close to science. The knowledge produced from this work cannot be fully translated to the viewer. These physical insights are things that must be experienced. In this way Dancing-On-View is much more than a mere performance, it is an invitation to dance physical theory.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
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