Dance therapy collections : number three

This collection of articles by keynote speakers, Australian and overseas practitioners, developed out of presentations at the third Australian Dance Movement Therapy conference, ‘Weaving The Threads’, held in Melbourne in 2007. This volume includes 22 articles from Australian and international dance movement therapists and colleagues on a wide range of topics, from dance therapy's origins and directions, research and evaluation in dance-movement therapy to therapeutic applications and skill development for therapists.

Dancing habitus: the formation of a group (dance)

This article discusses how six individual dancers came to belong, stylistically, to a group, in a project that did not aim explicitly to create or bring about that belonging. The studio-based research project tested the creation of a group improvised dance through practising over a significant period of time with ‘scores’ or verbal propositions, usually relating to physical, bodily or movement notions such as tangling and untangling or being subject to gravity. This article looks at one question within the research: namely, whether the dancing individuals came, over time, to belong to a group, and if so, what enabled that belonging and what made the dance a group dance? The project did not centre on an objective to direct the creation of a ‘groupness’ or stylistic consistency but, rather, it supported the investigation of how this ‘groupness’ might come about.

National dance forum report

 The National Dance Forum aims to foster the artistic development of dance in Australia by providing a platform for discussion and engagement across the dance sector. Through a series of panels, keynote speeches, open forums and networking events, the 2013 National Dance Forum sought to increase the profile of Australian dance and to celebrate diversity and innovation across the industry.

The 2013 National Dance Forum was held at the Footscray Community Arts Centre, having moved from its 2011 location, Arts House. As in 2011, the participants for 2013 National Dance Forum included choreographers, dancers, independent artists, artistic directors, educators, researchers, dance producers and students. 177 individuals attended the 2013 Forum, with many traveling from interstate/overseas to participate in the Forum and to attend Dance Massive events.
This evaluation for the 2013 National Dance Forum has been developed to evaluate the success of the event against its stated aims and to assist in targeting new opportunities and directions for future Forums.

This evaluation has undertaken an analysis of the relevancy and effectiveness of this forum for participants using evaluation questionnaires developed by the National Dance Forum and issued to all participants on the final day of the Forum. This evaluation collates and analyses the responses of 64 respondents in the areas of their own individual professional focus, their experiences as participants in the 2013 National Dance Forum including the strengths and weaknesses of the event, and the relevancy and effectiveness of the Forum for the Australian dance sector.

What’s the score? Using scores in dance improvisation

This paper explores the use of scores or verbal propositions inimprovising dance. Examining my use of scores in my own improvisationpractice it discusses what scores might be and might do and how theyrelate to the real time composition of dance in the present of its making.To help explore these ideas I refer to the theory of Nelson Goodman anddiscuss the use of scores by other dance practitioners including StevePaxton, Yvonne Meier and Anna Halprin.

Navigating control and illusion: functional interactivity versus ‘faux-interactivity’ in transmedia dance performance

Interactivity – a networked loop in which a performer’s live data feeds a digital system – can bridge the divide between live performance and digital entities in transmedia dance performances. In the ‘entanglement scene’ of Australian Dance Theatre’s Multiverse (2014), choreographer Garry Stewart and the creative coders and animators at the Deakin Motion.Lab utilise ‘faux-interactivity’, or a perceived relationship between the dancers and digital entities that exists only from the perspective of the audience. The spectre of ‘faux-interactivity’ challenges the spontaneity in live, embodied performance art because it both integrates live performance with prerendered digital content and offers a potential structure for a shared, dispersed creative and choreographic process across numerous and shared artistic and technological platforms. This paper investigates the concept of ‘faux-interactivity’, suggesting that its use can be a catalyst for moving beyond the limitations and values of ‘real’, or functional interactive systems within a theatrical context, and positing that definitions of ‘interactivity’ might be further expanded to accommodate the shifting timelines inherent in the disparate creative processes of human performance and coding.

Scenes from another life (the paper)

What is my dance now? My body is saturated with images and details. My choreography has become an exorcism of ghosts of “opening-nights past” as I dance out memories and events inscribed on my body. A chorus of my other selves now accompanies my stage performance, live and virtual, real and imagined, past and present.

Dancing the thesis : potential and pitfalls in practice-led research

Practice-led or multi modal these (describing examinable outcomes of postgraduate study which comprise the practice of dancing/choreography with an accompanying exegesis) are an emerging strength of dance scholarship; a form of enquiry that has been gaining momentum over a decade, particularly in Australia and the United Kingdom. It has been strongly argued that, in this form of research, legitimate claims to new knowledge are embodied predominantly within the practice itself (Pakes 2003) and that these findings are emergent, contingent and often interstitial contained within both the material form of the practice and in the symbolic languages surrounding the form.

This paper draws on Dancing between diversity and consistency: Refining assessment in postgraduate studies in dance, a study conducted with funding by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council 2006-2008, to critically examine some of the issues raised by such degrees. The study's structure formed around extensive literature reviews into higher degree dance studies; general examination/assessment discussions at research masters and doctoral levels; and issues arising from the relatively new artistic degrees involving practice components. Focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with 74 supervisors/examiners, research deans and administrators, and candidates/graduates elicited the views on assessing practice-led dance research of two principal participant groups; the professional dance community represented by Ausdance (The Australian Dance Council) and the staff and student cohort of Australian universities who offered dance or related postgraduate degrees.

Tensions arose through the project specifically in terms of deciding what kinds of articulations of practice-led dance research might be acceptable at the PhD level. Here, we address underlying issues of interdisciplinarity that arise from the current common practice of requiring a written requirement for PhD theses. This leads to a consideration of how differing cultural inflections and practices might be incorporated into our reading and evaluation of theses, how creative approaches to layered documentation can function as durable artifacts of creative research while contributing to the overall 'knowledge generation' of the thesis, and what kinds of language structures, such as metaphor, allusion and symbol, can be co opted to function generative in dialogue with other kinds of texts and discourses.

Real-time motion capture interactive, 3D stereoscopic visualization

Vincs, McCormick and dancers Steph Hutchinson & Megan Beckwith present live motion capture interactive pipelines that visualise the kinematics of a performer’s movement in stereoscopic environments created using the Unity game engine, and discuss their use in Choreotopography (2010) and Choreotopography (2011). This work forms part of Vincs’ ARC Discovery Project Capturing Dance: using motion capture to enhance the creation of innovative Australian dance (DP0987101).

Pre-visualization techniques with live lensing system enhances workflow for interactive performance creation.

Vincs & Divers, with dancer Steph Hutchinson, present a new system for real-time previsualization in Motion Builder that enables choreographers and artists making interactive 3D work to make on-the-fly lensing decisions. Using motion capture to drive a ‘character’ created from a cloth simulation in real time, the presentation highlights the advantage of live lensing for interactive work-flow in creating 3D dance visualizations. This work forms part of Vincs’ ARC Discovery project ‘Building innovative capacity in Australian dance through new visualization technologies’ (DP120101695).

NEST

Indigenous choreographer Monica Stevens, dancer Rheannan Port and lead researcher Kim Vincs present motion capture visualization of indigenous dance movements for Stevens’ work NEST. This work forms part of Vincs’ ARC Discovery Project Capturing Dance: using motion capture to enhance the creation of innovative Australian dance(DP0987101).