Exhausting dance : performance and the politics of movement, by Andre Lepecki

The article reviews the book "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement," by Andre Lepecki.

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 card : light : sound : space : moves : a live-performance mix-re-mix event

12 minute solo within an hour-long work, performed 18 - 22 February 2004  at the Dancehouse, Melbourne

Dancing beyond exercise : young people's experiences in dance classes

Dance classes in urban settings may have a role in health-promotion programmes seeking to increase physical activity amongst young people. However, little is so far known about the motivations, experiences or health outcomes of those participating in dance classes. This qualitative study of young people attending recreational dance classes addressed motivations, the nature of the class experience, and implications for health and well-being. Data show that young dance participants' experiences of 'the physical' are embedded in social, community/cultural or other values, and involve respect for older teachers and physical knowledge/expertise gained over the long term. Encouragement of dance-class participation may offer an important strategy for health promotion as long as the physical activity value of dance classes is not promoted in narrow, bio-mechanical terms.

Measuring responses to dance : is there a 'grammer' of dance?

This paper reports a series of experiments that investigated how dance artists learn to see and understand dance. We measured, in real time, the responses of a number of dance artists and students, to a range of different dance stimuli to gain an understanding of how observers respond to structural elements of dance as they unfold over time.

A quantitative approach to analysing reliability of engagement responses to dance

Perhaps one of the most important end products of a dance work is how it  effects its observers (typically its audience, but also the dancers and choreographers). Of the many ways of discussing and analysing dance, one
approach in its infancy is quantification. Our research involves combining continuous response techniques and human response methods to see if we can tease out relationships between continuous, quantitative evaluative responses and the more qualitative choreographer intentions. The aim of this paper is to describe how evaluative responses can be quantified at all, then how they can be related to an unfolding dance work, and finally, how we can isolate ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ or ‘reliable’ evaluations of a dance work from those which are no more than a spurious set of not-very-useful numbers presented under the guise of a valid assessment.

Aura, real-time motion capture dance and 3D stereoscopic dance

Aura explored the potential of motion capture and 3D stereo projection to visualize 1950's dance philosopher, Susanne K. Langer's notion of 'virtual force'.

Choreographer-mathematician collaboration: developing machine segmentation techniques for motion capture analysis of dance

This paper/presentation focuses on the science of human movement, motion capture and cognition in action, and examines the necessity of choreographer-mathematician collaboration in developing appropriate analysis techniques.