Social turkey

Social Turkey is a short digital dance video developed over a series of weekly meetings with a group of sprightly and defiant sixty-plus year olds resident in Limerick. Very early in the process artist Ciara Finnegan and choreographer Jenny Roche found each individual expressing a wonderful enthusiasm for dance, an eagerness to perform and a healthy refusal to conform to stereotypes of aging. Finnegan was keen that this project should support an exchange of ideas rather than employ a top-down directorial structure. While Roche devised the fundamentals of the dance and Finnegan manned the camera, each participant contributed thereafter - improvising on a step sequence and collaborating on patterns that ultimately determined much of the look of the result. The work seeks to amplify the represented interests of a wider community while celebrating the vivacity of the particular group and the sheer fun of the collaboration.

A glossary of bodily responses

A collaborative video with Avril Huddy where two viewpoints, performer and documenter, were presented simultaneously to investigate Arakawa and Gin’s notion of “boundary-swaying”. In this performance-work, the performer influences what the camera is able to capture by engaging the documenter in a form of improvised dance. The performer’s movements appear impulsive and unpredictable, testing ways for the documenter to frame the performer’s movement. The images revealed by the documenter’s camera reflect a complexity of moments and co-incidences, evoking a sense of the performer’s embodied thinking within improvised movement. While a second camera uses a conventional wide angle shot to document the unfolding of the performance-work and track the connection between the documenter and the performer. While the performance-work itself is still highly-experimental, the ideas underpinning this exploration suggest how future investigations integrating more sensitive technology such as motion capture and tracking devises may be investigated. This performance-work formed part of the Creative Response Exhibition curated by Alan Prohm, Bill Lavender and Jason Nelson and a peer-review committee as part of the proceedings of the AG3 Online: Third International Arakawa and Gins Architecture and Philosophy Conference, hosted by the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University.

Self and peer review in dance classes using personal video feedback

Many forms of formative feedback are used in dance training to refine the dancer’s spatial and kinaesthetic awareness in order that the dancer’s sensorimotor intentions and observable danced outcomes might converge. This paper documents the use of smartphones to record and playback movement sequences in ballet and contemporary technique classes. Peers in pairs took turns filming one another and then analysing the playback. This provided immediate visual feedback of the movement sequence as performed by each dancer. This immediacy facilitated the dancer’s capacity to associate what they felt as they were dancing with what they looked like during the dance. The often-dissonant realities of self-perception and perception by others were thus guided towards harmony, generating improved performance and knowledge relating to dance technique. An approach is offered for potential development of peer review activities to support summative progressive assessment in dance technique training.

Inertial motion capture and live performance (with a focus on dance)

3D Motion capture is a fast evolving field and recent inertial technology may expand the artistic possibilities for its use in live performance. Inertial motion capture has three attributes that make it suitable for use with live performance; it is portable, easy to use and can operate in real-time. Using four projects, this paper discusses the suitability of inertial motion capture to live performance with a particular emphasis on dance. Dance is an artistic application of human movement and motion capture is the means to record human movement as digital data. As such, dance is clearly a field in which the use of real-time motion capture is likely to become more common, particularly as projected visual effects including real-time video are already often used in dance performances. Understandably, animation generated in real-time using motion capture is not as extensive or as clean as the highly mediated animation used in movies and games, but the quality is still impressive and the ‘liveness’ of the animation has compensating features that offer new ways of communicating with an audience.

Intercultural dance : exploring a Finnish migrant connection with indigenous cultures through dance

This research is a dance-based, autoethnographic study which explores my connection with place as a Savolainen woman born on Kalkadoon country; an Australian-born Finn. Edward Relph states 'the more profoundly inside a place the person feels, the stronger will be his or her identity with that place' (1976, 49). I am interested in how a sense of "place identity" has informed my choreographic practice. Autoethnography is important because it places the research within a lived experience: my insider account of a lived experience within the White Australia Policy through my lens as a first generation Australian-born Finn. It also speaks to the space in-between for those, like me, who feel they do not fit into mainstream identity but look like they do. By exploring my lived experience through dance autoethnography, new understandings of my place identity within a cultural, social and political context have emerged. Ellis and Flaherty state ‘subjectivity is situated such that the voices in our heads and the feelings in our bodies are linked to political, cultural, and historical contexts’ (1992, 4). In order to begin my rehearsal process, I wanted a cultural framework which related to connection with land to guide the research. My investigations led me to the Maori examples of "Tikanga Maori" (Tikanga are the customs and traditions), in particular the "Pepeha" (Introduction) and allowed me to challenge my choreographic practice through this cultural framework.

Let's Dance: A Language for Service Behavior Modeling

In Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), software systems are decomposed into independent units, namely services, that interact with one another through message exchanges. To promote reuse and evolvability, these interactions are explicitly described right from the early phases of the development lifecycle. Up to now, emphasis has been placed on capturing structural aspects of service interactions. Gradually though, the description of behavioral dependencies between service interactions is gaining increasing attention as a means to push forward the SOA vision. This paper deals with the description of these behavioral dependencies during the analysis and design phases. The paper outlines a set of requirements that a language for modeling service interactions at this level should fulfill, and proposes a language whose design is driven by these requirements.

Talking about watching : using the video card game and wiki-web technology to engage IT students in developing observational skills.

Designers need to develop good observational skills in order to conduct user studies that reveal the subtleties of human interactions and adequately inform design activity. In this paper we describe a game format that we have used in concert with wiki-web technology, to engage our IT and Information Environments students in developing much sharper observational skills. The Video Card Game is a method of video analysis that is suited to design practitioners as well as to researchers. It uses the familiar format of a card game similar to "Happy Families,, to help students develop themes of interactions from watching video clips. Students then post their interaction themes on wiki-web pages, which allows the teaching team and other students to edit and comment on them. We found that the tangible (cards), game, role playing and sharing aspects of this method led to a much larger amount of interaction and discussion between student groups and between students and the teaching team, than we have achieved using our traditional teaching methods, while taking no more time on the part of the teaching staff. The quality of the resulting interaction themes indicates that this method fosters development of observational skills.In the paper we describe the motivations, method and results in full. We also describe the research context in which we collected the videotape data, and how this method relates to state of the art research methods in interaction design for ubiquitous computing technology.

Being There

This 60 minute work looked to challenge traditional expectations of how dancers ‘perform’ and what it means when they are ‘themselves’ onstage. The audience was asked to sit in an ellipse on stage and the dancers were often performing quite close to them. While the audience didn’t move once the work began, the proximity to the dancers allowed them an unusual opportunity to see these dancers deconstructing their own profession and their own world of performance in an intimate environment. This was done for, and with the audience, and for some, it connected them deeply with the performers. For Georg Simmel, an early 20th Century sociologist, ‘the eye of a person discloses his own soul when he seeks to uncover that of another. What occurs in this direct mutual reciprocity is the entire field of human relationships.’ Performer authenticity, while utilised often in film and theatre, is not common in the form of dance. Because of our societal tendency toward the desire for authenticity, and its uncommon usage in dance, an inversion of this convention is one of the many tools that is available to choreographers to form deep connections with their audience and is one that is gaining popularity throughout the world as a form of connection via reality and the immediacy of live performance.

Medeleven

Medeleven was a practice-based research work that challenged conventional notions of how audiences ‘experience’ contemporary dance. It resulted in a 40 minute ‘experiential’ performance that inverted the traditional ‘passive’ presentation paradigm by situating the audience centrally within the creative process. The ‘traditional presentation paradigm’ was inverted in numerous ways including: asking the audience onstage with the performers, placing swings onstage for the audience to play on during the performance and guiding the audience through backstage corridors before entering onstage – all of which added elements of physicality, agency and liminality to the performance not usually available to audience members of contemporary dance. Five dancers moved throughout the space allowing the audience to choose where and how they engaged with this work and the swings were utilised both as a performance space and for audience seating. In addition to these spatial variations, the quadraphonic soundscore created distinct ‘environments’ throughout the stage space that varied individual experience possibilities. By positing performance as an experiential phenomenon, the pivotal objective of this work was to create a live-art experience that extended its performativity to include audience members as active meaning-makers, challenging both their role within this paradigm and their expectations of contemporary dance. The work produced strong responses from the audience with surveys indicating the presentation format, as well as the construction of the work, changed audience experience and ability to connect with the dance work. The research suggested that, in addition to existing research on dance audiences, barriers to engagement with contemporary dance may include how the art is constructed and where the audience is positioned within that creative framework. The research builds upon artistic practices being undertaken throughout the world that challenge the notion of existing ‘passive’ performance paradigms via creative ‘engagement’ with audience.

Nodule

Nodule is 19'54" musical work for two electronic music performers, two laptop computers and a custom built, sensor-based microphone controller - the e-Mic (Extended Mic-stand Interface Controller). This interface was developed by one of the co-authors, Donna Hewitt. The e-Mic allows a vocal performer to manipulate their voice in real time by capturing physical gestures via an array of sensors - pressure, distance, tilt – in addition to ribbon controllers and an X-Y joystick microphone mount. Performance data are then sent to a computer, running audio-processing software, which is used to transform the audio signal from the microphone in real time. The work seeks to explore the liminal space between the electro-acoustic music tradition and more recent developments in the electronic dance music tradition. It does so on both a performative (gestural) and compositional (sonic) level. Visually, the performance consists of a singer and a laptop performer, hybridising the gestural context of these traditions. On a sonic level, the work explores hybridity at deeper levels of the musical structure than simple bricolage or collage approaches. Hybridity is explored at the level of the sonic gesture (source material), in production (audio processing gestures), in performance gesture, and in approaches to the use of the frequency spectrum, pulse and meter. The work was designed to be performed in a range of contexts from concert halls, to clubs, to rock festivals, across a range of staging and production platforms. As a consequence, the work has been tested in a range of audience contexts, and has allowed the transportation of compositional and performance practices across traditional audience demographic boundaries.