Overture - When the Dance gets Digital
by Terry Braun
If what artists make is art, then what a choreographer makes is choreography--right? And choreography, we all know, is the planned movement of people's bodies when they are dancing. It's something we think of as happening in real time (in other words, live) and in a real space (such as a theatre).
But what if the work of the choreographer has left both real time and real space? This is a question that is beginning to intrigue some of the world's top dance makers, who are creating work on, and in some cases, for the computer
We've known for a long time that dance doesn't have to be live. Choreographers have been making dance for films since the turn of the century. Many silent movies made in the 1920s, for example, included dancers. During the 30's many of the classic Hollywood movies were musicals and were driven by the brilleant dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Often the choreographers (like Gene Kelly) were also the directors.
But after the second world war and the explosive spread of TV, dance somehow got left behind. Sure there was the endless line of long legs for Light Entertainment and Variety - but both the great popular tradition of the musical and contemporary developments in modern dance and ballet were poorly represented on television.
Over the past 15 years, some choreographers such as Twyla Tharp and Merce Cunningham in the US and a few pioneering choreographers in Britain have tried to make pieces specifically for TV. But even with valiant attempts like the Dance-Lines initiatives on Britain's terrestrial Channel 4 in the 1980s, it still seemed as if dance had missed the media boat.
The 1990s has seen a change in attitude-most noticeably among young choreographers who want to make work that is less concerned with fitting into one of the traditional categories of dance, opera, theatre or art, and more concerned with a mixture of media. Choreographers are not alone in this. The idea of creating work that crosses media is well understood in most artistic circles. And central to this approach is one of the most powerful new tools to be made available to the artistic community: the personal computer.
Today most artists have some sense of the place of computers in their world and their work. Composers, visual artists, architects, writers, film-makers such as John Whitney in the early 70's. Even sculptors, have all developed working relationships with computers. They can choose to work with or without a computer or they can combine using computers with more traditional methods. In the old days, architects would be lost without their pencils--now they'd be lost without architectural Computer Aided Design packages.
Until very recently choreographers didn't even know the computer was an option for them. All that was changed by Life Forms, a computer program designed for dancers by Tom Calvert and his team at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Life Forms allows choreographers to process movement in the way that writers process words - building up the finished piece by adding together a series of movements. It runs on a fairly ordinary personal computer (at the moment only on Macs, but PC versions are soon to be announced) and only costs about GBP175.
The simplest use of Life Forms is as an alternative to video in the rehearsal studio. The choreographer can use LifeForms as a digital "model box". They can experiment with movements, then add these together to create an aesthetically pleasing "phrase" and then they can run several of these phrases together to see what an entire piece may look like. Next the choreographer may show individual phrases to the dancers, either in LifeForms itself or in the real studio. If necessary, LifeForm's figures can be printed out as a score. (image). The choreography can also be saved as a QuickTime movie and sent to dancers or other collaborators (like composers) via snail or e-Mail.
The liason between computer and choreographer stops here for many. But this needn't be the end of the relationship. Once the choreographer has made the choreography in LifeForms they can, if they wish, re-work the piece using different software (see Act Two) This re-working can result in images of dancers complete with shading, shadows and texture and this work can in turn be recorded onto video to a broadcast standard
There is also a third, and possibly even more interesting option that the use of a program such as Life Forms offers, and that is the creation of dances for the digital domain as happened at the recent Dance Umbrella event in London.
Easy access to the Internet means that choreographers can make and disseminate their work with an effectiveness and freedom unsurpassed in history.
The new creative possibilities afforded by this technology are very exciting. What's more, the mixture of powerful, relatively inexpensive computers and software and World Wide Web access offers unique possibilities for new relationships with new audiences for dance--and all this will be far more under the choreographer's control than even Busby Berkley's finest films.
To put these theories into practice and make your own choreography using LifeForms - click here
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