Follow your heart and something will come : subjective factors in the sustainability of early to mid career contemporary dance artists

This project comes out of a desire to investigate the subjective factors that influence how and why people become and stay dance artists. When dance artists in Australia earn, on average, $27,000 per year, and only $16,700 of that income is dance-related, according to David Throsby’s (2003) recent study for the Australia Council, one has to start to think that maybe sustainability, that is, artists’ ability and willingness to stay within the industry, is not solely governed by economic factors. One has to also start to think that subjective factors, things to do with the value, satisfaction and quality of life dance artists get from what they do, might be as significant, if not more significant, drivers of sustainability than pure economics.

Korean 'Chung-soh' and Australian contemporary dance

This project investigated a characteristic concept of Korean culture, "Chung-soh", to develop an understanding a 'Korean-ness' in dance and of how "Chung-soh" informs cross-cultural dance processes involving Korean and Australian artists. At the same time the author developed her artistic identity through investigating and understanding her dance practice. The DVDs contain 2 works choreographed by the author: Cross sections and Embryo.

Practising research, researching practice : thinking through contemporary dance

Practice as research is now an accepted mode whereby artists can obtain a higher degree in our universities. But what conditions pertain for them there? Daily experiences of the misfit between the university, particularly in its current corporate guise, and the embodied practices upon which I draw have helped me, paradoxically, to clarify certain dance values which can perhaps have wider resonance. These values relate to concepts and ideas that can be found articulated by many practising artists and a number of other thinkers and practitioners including Winnicott, Alexander and Arendt. Focusing on here and now practicalities and issues, such as the nature of the studio floor, this article explores and argues for the importance of aesthetic experience and attention to life as we are living it: to experience, paradox, action, and sensation.

Development and assessment of an incremental fatigue protocol for contemporary dance

Nine trained contemporary dancers performed a modality-specific, heart-rate-monitored, choreographed fatiguing dance protocol with an assumption of fatigue at volitional exhaustion (RPE 16). Postural stability was assessed as the variability of ground reaction forces and the centre of pressure during the performance of a flat-foot arabesque. Psychological response was assessed using self-reported fatigue, psychological distress (PD), and psychological well-being (PWB) (Subjective Exercise Experience Scale). After reaching RPE 16 in 15.7 ± 2.6 mins, heart rate decreased to the post-warm-up level within 64 ± 9 sec. Variability of ground reaction forces or the centre of pressure was not changed. There were no significant changes in fatigue, psychological distress, or psychological well-being. Within fatigue, there was a significant increase in the item tired (p = 0.04). As supported by the heart rate data and RPE, the protocol achieved an appropriate level of physical demand. No changes in the stability indices were observed, possibly attributed to the rapid recovery in heart rate. The expression of only tiredness suggests the use of a disassociative attentional style by the dancers. The project represents pilot work toward the validation of a monitoring process that supports dancer health and awareness training.

Interactive dance performance : movement data and the 'materiality' of the system

This paper describes a recent performance work I made using dance and live feed video
processing, 1 + x: mid-range projections, commissioned by the Seoul Contemporary Dance
Company and first performed in Melbourne in July 2005. This work forms a basis for discussing
my interest in creating performance images that reveal 'interiority'. I am interested in how you
embed the 'feel' of the human systematically in an interactive structure, and how that process
can produce a poetic that arises from the detailed and nuanced play between real and virtual
images on the same screen. How do you abstract and play with a performer's movement, play
with it in real and virtual time, so that it gives the work an emotional charge? Its like playing with
the process of 'becoming virtual' - and I'm being deliberately Deleuzian about that - how do you
'become virtual' in the sense of melding performer and image so that the meaning exists
between - in the connection between the two?

This quest to get the energy, the 'lived', 'felt' quality of the movement into the imagery gives rise
to research questions about how 'presence' is perceived in movement. What elements of the
raw movement data do you need to keep and what can you throwaway, and still keep the
personality, the emotion, the 'life' of that movement? How do you make a virtual, interactive
performance system that has its own 'materiality'?

Dance interrogations

A performed conference presentation incorporating dance, video projection and spoken word.

WORK: hybridity and endurance within solo dance practice and performance

Dance interrogations 2013 (in the red train)

A new performance work in the series titled "Dance Interrogations" which explores and responds to a specific site and a moving audience through dance, spoken word, improvisation and projected screendance imagery.

Snapshots of complexity: using motion capture and principal component analysis to reconceptualise dance

This article brings together the disparate worlds of dance practice, motion capture and statistical analysis. Digital technologies such as motion capture offer dance artists new processes for recording and studying dance movement. Statistical analysis of these data can reveal hidden patterns in movement in ways that are semantically ‘blind’, and are hence able to challenge accepted culturo-physical ‘grammars’ of dance creation. The potential benefit to dance artists is to open up new ways of understanding choreographic movement. However, quantitative analysis does not allow for the uncertainty inherent in emergent, artistic practices such as dance. This article uses motion capture and principal component analysis (PCA), a common statistical technique in human movement recognition studies, to examine contemporary dance movement, and explores how this analysis might be interpreted in an artistic context to generate a new way of looking at the nature and role of movement patterning in dance creation.

Dance interrogations

A solo performance work incorporating live dance, spoken word and projected video.