Speculative Annotation on Human Dance Improvisations and their Digital Configurations
Journal Publication
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media
Volume 17, 2021 - Issue 1: Digital Annotation and the Understanding of Bodily Practices
"We should be learning not about absolutes but about nuances of becoming other than what we’ve been designed to be. That’s what the 21st century is meant to be about."
This insightful and pithy suggestion, made by the artist and researcher Marc Garrett (FutureEverything, 2020) constitutes a fitting conceptual framing to the herein research on the possible becomings of the other-than-human dancing body. The other-than-human body lies among the more-than-human, inhuman and human-as-humus variations of Haraway’s Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016) in the sense that this body is a refugee of an anthropocentric territory.
In this project, technology comes as the means to explore new ways of witnessing the dancing body. "It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties" (Haraway, 2013). Technology matters for the reason that it is a more-than-human medium per se and it facilitates the thinking of the body without the human. It is used as a mutating lens between the actual body and the perceived-by-the-viewer body, diminishing the anthropomorphic characteristics of the dancer and allowing for ontological speculations to emerge. What am I seeing, if not a human?
Through motion capture technology, several dancing bodies were captured as outlines while improvising. Shape was this research’s vehicle to bypass the human materiality of dance. Shape as a contour, as geometrical formations, motifs and relations that would later allow for associations of possible materialities to emerge, for example, a curled-up dancer captured as a circular contour could trigger associations of a planet or a petri dish. What else can the human figure become when it is emptied of its content, its flesh and bones? What word associations are triggered while witnessing a faceless blob? Is there the same space for speculations when the figure is evidently human, when it has a face and a name? Dance annotation comes as the means to verbalise the speculations over technology’s input.
Link to journal and full text.
Extracts and stills from the recordings, @ Irini Kalaitzidi, 2020
C R E D I T S
Concept | Choreography | Tech development: Irini Kalaitzidi
Dancers: Pagona Boulmpasakou, Irini Kalaitzidi, Danae Pazirgiannidi, Angelos Papadopoulos
Filming and Digital media support: Stathis Doganis