Towards a poetics of restriction
Jung In Jung
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PhD in Music and Music Technology
Centre for Research in New Music
University of Huddersfield
jungin.j@gmail.com
[17] Available at: https://vimeo.com/56649989 (Accessed: 11th April 2018).
[18] In case more scientific proof is needed about how musicians and dancers perceive movement differently, ongoing research is being conducted by Hanna Poikonen at the University of Helsinki into how musicians and dancers use their brains. Poikonen explains that musicians have a tendency to seek precision in certain acts whereas dancers see the entire flow of a movement that uses the whole body. See her article at https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/health/a-dancers-brain-develops-in-a-unique-way.
[19] Choreutics means “the art, or the science, dealing with the analysis and synthesis of movement” (Ullmann, 2011: 8).
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[20] I should clarify that I mean to use the word phase as a direct quotation from Laban since I am often asked to clarify between the two words phase and phrase. I believe Laban uses the word phase to express that single movement status as a temporal status within a constant progress of movement containing the result of the previous status, or the intention towards the next status.
[21] http://dance.dibris.unige.it/
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[23] Laban defines Kinesphere as “the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support when standing on one foot” (Ullmann, 2011: 10).
[24] http://www.yannseznec.com/works/one-pig-live/
[25] http://dimainstone.com/project/human-harp/
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[26] See the interview with Di Mainstone available at: https://youtu.be/_U02X8UWgxY (Accessed: 21st September 2018).
1.2. Physical restriction as a core choreographic method
My first research question was “How can my interactive sound system aide collaboration by encouraging dancers to use their intuitive vocabulary, not just demand that they learn the technological and musical functions of the interface?” To answer this, I decided to study first how choreographers and dancers create choreography and seek ways to integrate motion-sensing devices as primarily a choreographic tool.
Some criticisms have arisen in the dance technology community towards artists who were “eager to work with newly arising digital tools”, but who had “little understanding of the inner workings of electronics or computer code”, which in turn created trivial works that were mere demonstrations of the technology (Salter, 2010: 263–264). This is a critical point of view; however, I found it not entirely fair towards the artists. The ease of use of Max, with its graphical interface, and flexible and user-friendly tools like Isadora[15] attracted composers and artists who were new to programming, enabling them to create interactive artworks intuitively (Winkler, 1995b; Dixon, 2007: 198). There are creative users who are not necessarily software developers. I thought the problem was not lack of knowledge of how to adapt the technology effectively, but a lack of investigation and observation required to comprehend artistic media that the artists did not primarily practise. For instance, Winkler’s research into gestural composition (1995a) neglected dance practice or techniques, but assumed that their interactive syntheses could be used effectively for dance composition. Marcelo M. Wanderley (2001) thoroughly analyses the gestural qualities of expert instrumentalists during performance, but does not explain how this movement analysis is valuable for dance creation.
The mapping strategy should also vary depending on the style of dance. Based on my previous experiments with a variety of dancers, I found some styles of dance create an interesting aesthetic when the movement results in a clear relationship with sound, but this is not the case for every style. For instance, when I worked with a break dancer, his popping dance movement resulted in an interesting one-to-one interaction with the tightly synchronised music, as this is a genre of dance usually danced to the musical beat.[16] But when I tried to apply the same principle to other contemporary dancers, the results were too obvious and tedious. For my PhD research, I decided to work with contemporary dancers, and therefore, my contextualisation is strictly based on contemporary dance technique and music.
What, then, is choreography? Can the instrumentalist’s movement be assumed to be dancing? “The term choreography has gone viral”, says Susan Leigh Foster (2010). She writes that since the mid-2000s the word has been used as “general referent for any structuring of movement, not necessarily the movement of human beings” (Foster, 2010: 32). I saw a good example for Foster’s statement when I recently attended the conference Moving Matter(s): On Code, Choreography and Dance Data as part of the Fiber Festival in Amsterdam in 2017. The artist Ruairi Glynn presented his choreographic idea in his work Fearful Symmetry,[17] which he exhibited at Tate Modern in 2012. However, Glynn’s work did not include a human figure, but rather a kinetic sculpture that encouraged the audience to react and move along with it (Figure 1.4). The reason this kind of movement from non-dancers and also non-human movement has come to be recognised as ‘choreographic’ is because dance has changed dramatically since the mid-twentieth century to eliminate virtuosic movements. For example, choreographers such as Paul Taylor and the Judson Dance Theater deliberately incorporated everyday movements such as walking, running, and sitting into their work (Au, 2002: 161, 168). Also, as shown at the 2011 exhibition Move: Choreographing You: Art and Dance since the 1960s at the Hayward Gallery, the term has been used to describe the process of paintings, sculptures, and installations such as Allan Kaprow’s movement score 18 Happenings in 6 parts (1959), Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970), and Pablo Bronstein’s Magnificent Triumphal Arch (2010). These works were focused on certain movements of the artists or the viewers, and were, therefore, choreographed. In his essay Notes on Music and Dance, Steve Reich (1973: 41) writes that the Judson group choreographers have embraced “any movement as dance”, equivalent to John Cage’s statement that “any sound is music”. It seems that dance has become a more approachable place for laypeople to propose ideas.
Figure 1.4. Fearful Symmetry (2012) by Ruairi Glynn at Tate Modern.
Yet, what I have learned from my previous collaborations with dancers is that I should be aware that dancers and musicians have acquired different physical practices.[18] If I only focus on the mappings of body movement to my sound synthesis, I can easily mistreat dancers as substitute musicians. I therefore felt the need to understand what choreography means in dance first. Movement art pioneer Rudolf Laban describes choreography as “the planning and composition of a ballet or a dance” and its notation with “drawings of figures and symbols of movements” (Ullmann, 2011: viii). Jack Anderson (1974: 9) writes that “dance is movement that has been organized so that it is rewarding to behold, and the craft of making and arranging dances is called choreography”. In their book on choreographic composition techniques, Lynne Anne Blom and L. Tarin Chaplin (1982: 3) express the difficulty of turning creative ideas for dances into “choreographic entities; the fully completed presentation”. What I deduced from these definitions of the term was that choreography is composed of ideas with regards to organising, arranging, and structuring movements, not mere fragments of gestures.
Here, I explain further how Laban writes about movement in his book Choreutics.[19] Laban insists that it is “essential to find out the natural characteristics of the single phases[20] which we wish to join together in order to create a sensible sequence. … [however] we must always feel and comprehend both the preceding and the following phase” (Ullmann, 2011: 4). I looked at some studies in which Laban’s movement analysis was used. These included the sonification of dance movement research from InfoMus,[21] which is based on the emotional quality of movement and music from choreutic theory. However, I find this approach is rather musicological or HCI-related. Also, my collaborating dancers and I do not presuppose an emotional direction when we start our collaborations, rather we let the dramaturgy be evoked as we experiment. Just as Laban created a new dance notation system in his choreutics, so can similar attempts be seen in the dance movement archive project by Royce Neagle et al. (2002) and the movement library Topos[22] for dance and music gesture control by Luiz Naveda and Ivani Santana (2014). Although these classified dance movement according to a vast amount of movement data and detailed analysis with different parts of the body, it was hard to find within them the flexibility of using different limbs to express the same quality of movement. In fact, Laban’s dance notation did not indicate specific limbs because he wanted to preserve the individual’s freedom to choose which limbs to perform the notation with, according to their own style of dance (Ullmann, 2011: 30–31). It seemed to me, that these projects focused too much on singular gestural information and did not consider the entire flow of a dance construction.
What I found most interesting from Laban’s analysis was that he sees choreography as a “continuous flux” of movement that should be understood alongside both “the preceding and the following phases” (Ullmann, 2011: 4). Laban’s dance notation shows movement “trace-forms” through directional symbols inside the kinesphere[23] rather than specific postures (Figure 1.5), and it inspired me to think about what principally stimulates which movement. The common way of using motion-tracking or motion-sensing devices in interactive music and dance collaborations is to use the technology as a mere interface for preserving the freedom of the dancer’s movement (Figure 1.6), and to connect the presupposed musicality of movement data to the output result. Instead, to actively stimulate and engage dancers to create choreography with the interactive system, I decided to provide a physical and tactile motion-sensing device that primarily challenged performers to ‘dance’, and to let these movements create the sounding results (Figure 1.7).
Figure 1.5: The dance notation invented by Rudolf Laban. The symbols indicate directions of a movement in flow (left) and the same movement is described in “scaffold-writing” to demonstrate how it looks in the kinesphere (right). The three planes indicate bottom, middle and top of body. (Ullmann, 2011: 129–130)
Figure 1.6: Motion-sensing device as interface to preserve the dancer’s freedom of movement.
Figure 1.7: Providing stimuli to dance with the motion-sensing device to result in sound composition.
For my own research, I used Gametrak controllers and found them to be a good fit for my purposes. Gametrak was developed as a pre-wireless motion-tracking technology and disappeared quickly after the introduction of Nintendo Wii Remote controllers and Kinect cameras. In comparison with the wireless motion sensors, Gametrak’s motion tracking system is simple and limited. Each unit has a pair of potentiometers tethered by red cables that users can extend to action the controller through 360Ëš; the controller tracks the movement direction and length of the cable. Originally the controller came with a pair of gloves that let users play a golf game (Figure 1.8). However, I removed the gloves so as to prevent the dancers from using the controllers only with their hands, which can easily mislead them to treat the controllers solely as musical instruments. Instead, I connected carabiner clips to the end of the controllers so that they could be hooked onto belts and bracelets.
Figure 1.8: (above) Gametrak controllers are originally designed for PlayStation’s Real World Golf game by In2Games. (below) I could easily hack only the potentiometers from the newer model of Gametrak controllers.
The kinetic characteristics of the Gametrak invite dancers to move in certain intuitive ways by playing with the cables – pulling and twisting them, for example. However, the dancers soon understand that they can only reach a limited distance with the tethered controllers. Once I asked my former collaborator and choreographer Skye Reynolds to improvise while tethering six cables of Gametraks around her waist so that I could observe how a dancer would perform within an extremely restrictive setting (Figure 1.9). Reynolds became very cautious with the entangled cables and kept moving forward and backward to check how far she could reach. To my eyes this repetitive and somewhat glitch-like movement, in which the controller technology naturally created that restrictive movement, was fascinating. This experience led me to stop looking for higher quality motion-tracking technology and instead explore the Gametrak’s intrinsic physicality. As a consequence, the difference from wearable sensors is that I am ‘restricting’ the dancers’ bodies instead of letting them dance freely.
Figure 1.9: Choreographer Skye Reynolds twists her body with six cables of Gametrak controllers. (Photograph by Rocio Jungenfeld)
Gametraks have been used by other artists, musicians, and researchers in recent years. For instance, Yann Seznec created the new musical instrument StyHarp[24] for the live performance of the composer Matthew Herbert’s album One Pig (2011). As the name suggested, the StyHarp was designed to mimic a pigsty, and also to trigger sound by pulling, plucking, and twisting the strings. As another example, Di Mainstone developed Gametrak-inspired controllers with her research team from Queen Mary University of London for large-scale installations (Meckin et al., 2012) such as Human Harp (2013)[25] on Brooklyn Bridge. Similar to Seznec, this work suggested the musical instrument harp as well. It is apparent that these artists have been attracted to the visual characteristics of the Gametrak in creating their interactive musical installations. Although Mainstone’s works were demonstrated by dancers, her primary focus was on the use of the controllers as a visual element with the surrounding architecture while triggering sound simultaneously in an interactive installation rather than a choreographic method to guide the dancers. In fact, Human Harp could be played by any pedestrians not only by dancers.[26] However, I set my research goal as to integrate the visual characteristics of the Gametrak with choreographic methods so as to play my sound synthesis by professionally trained dancers.
[16] This is one of the performances I developed during the 2011 residency in Edinburgh with Yann Seznec. Available at: https://vimeo.com/27396331 (Accessed: 11th April 2018).
Figure 1.10: (Left) Rudolf Laban’s main directional indication in cubic space (Ullmann, 2011: 16). The three planes are bottom, middle, and top of the body. (Right) William Forsythe explains how to read Rudolf Laban’s notation system in his lecture video Improvisation Technologies.
I found Forsythe’s choreographic approach was interesting because he extended Laban’s notion of the kinesphere, as shown in his lecture video Improvisation Technologies published with ZKM in 2011 (Figure 1.10) (cited in Clark and Ando, 2014: 182). In the video, Forsythe demonstrates possible movement variations depending on a newly given axis without stepping away from the first position; the axis of movement is no longer the centre of the body. For instance, he shows a normal scale of kinesphere of the entire body in a cubic space, and then creates a smaller scale to isolate his left arm to make arm movement variation (Figure 1.11). Another example is that he imagines his right knee attached to the floor surface and creates a round shape forwards with his arms. To keep this relationship between his knee and arms, if the floor surface moves in front of his face he should move his arm upwards (Figure 1.12). Furthermore, Forsythe asks his dancers to imagine objects or geometric lines to create movement with or around. Re-orientating physical perception with these imaginary space and objects is Forsythe’s core movement creation technique.
Figure 1.11: (Above) Kinesphere is explained as a cubic space in Choreutics (Ullmann, 2011: 140). (Below) William Forsythe explains a cubic space around his entire body, and then scale it down only for his left arm.
Figure 1.12: William Forsythe examples how his movement variation can be created by re-orientating his body placement with the floor.
Based on these techniques, Forsythe’s dancers improvise with imaginary objects. For example, in the lecture video, the dancer Noah De Gelber improvises with an imaginary table or a chair (Figure 1.13). Forsythe provides inputs at “the beginning of a movement rather than on the end” and “in the process, discover[s] new ways of moving” (Forsythe and Kaiser, 1999). Similar to Forsythe, McGregor proposes that his dancers imagine an object as well as using other sensations such as colour or music to compose choreography (Figure 1.14). Another technique McGregor uses is to provide dancers with a physical problem, which they have to solve through movement. For example, dancers are asked to “picture a rod connected to their shoulder, which is then pushed or pulled by a partner some distance away” (Clark and Ando, 2014: 187). McGregor describes these ways of creating movement phrases with specific physical conditions as a “physical thinking process” (McGregor, 2012).
Figure 1.13: Using imaginary objects to devise choreography in William Forsythe’s lecture video Improvisation Technologies.
Figure 1.14: Sample tasks from Wayne McGregor described in the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices (deLahunta et al., 2011: 252).
Both Forsythe and McGregor use mental imagery as a choreographic stimulus. Instead of freely improvising, they restrict their physical condition with the imagined objects and space. Inspired by this method, I decided to replace the mental imagery with actual physical restriction using the cables of the Gametrak controllers (Figure 1.15). In this way, the Gametrak provides a technological restriction that governs my sound composition and movement creation as both an interface and a physical limitation that has to be accounted for by the dancers.
Figure 1.15: Gametrak controllers’ cables work as physical restrictions in the process of developing choreography.
This intrinsic physicality of the Gametrak made it possible to provide concrete movement tasks to the dancers, who could then play sound naturally as a result of executing these tasks. This process is explained in Figure 1.16, which shows the transition between different media from body (dance) to sound via visible and tactile technology. First, the dancers are required to tether to the Gametrak, and to find out how it affects their physical movement and what its limitations are by freely improvising. Second, they learn other visual stimuli and choreographic rules depending on the work. Third, the dancers listen to the sound they are triggering as they execute these tasks. Fourth, the dancers start devising movement phrases according to both the choreographic tasks and the sounds they are creating.
Figure 1.16: A diagram of the choreographic sound composition process.
Beyond using mental imagery, McGregor also showed physical transformation of the dancer’s body in Nemesis (2001)[27] by extending the arms with prostheses to seek new possible movements. The prosthetic instrument by Malloch and Hattwick (see Figure 1.2) is similar to this approach, as Malloch describes their instrument as an “extra limb” (Malloch, 2013). However, I wanted to discover the intrinsic and potential choreographic physicality of already existing objects or spaces rather than designing a new interface. I found Forsythe’s recent works were good directions towards achieving this idea. Forsythe’s solo exhibition The Fact of Matter at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, showed his “performative and space-related Choreographic Objects” (Forsythe, 2015). The works were curated together with some building features of the museum, and a brief instruction was provided alongside each of the works. For example, the work A Volume, Within Which It Is Not Possible for Certain Classes of Action to Arise (2015) is a low and small space in the building, and the instruction says “The space may be entered”. Figure 1.17 shows possible movements that can be created within the specific space. Another example from the show is Aufwand (2015), presented with the instruction “If you encounter difficulty opening the door, please persist”. Figure 1.18 shows how a number of people tried to open the door. Each adopts a different physical movement approach to deal with the same challenging task. Following these examples, I used ordinary chairs in my composition Temporal (Figure 1.19) and the corner of a room in The Music Room (Figure 1.20) and Queen of the Night as additional restrictive elements to create choreography.
Figure 1.17: A Volume, Within Which It Is Not Possible for Certain Classes of Action to Arise (2015) by William Forsythe (Forsythe, 2015: 22–23).
Figure 1.18: Aufwand (2015) by William Forsythe (Forsythe, 2015: 38–39).
Figure 1.19: Attached the cables of Gametrak controllers to chairs in Temporal.
Figure 1.20: The corner of the room is used in The Music Room.
As explained above, the integration of motion-sensing technology to create physical restriction is my own technique for employing directed improvisation as a compositional strategy. I also provided other choreographic rules and tasks related to the arrangement of the Gametrak cables. When the physical restriction mediated with technology combined with my choreographic rules, it eventually evolved into a choreographic sound composition (Figure 1.21). For me, such a restriction was an effective way to organise my sound, and a language with which to communicate with the performers. The process of choreographic sound composition with this method is explained in detail in Chapter 2.
