Towards a poetics of restriction
Jung In Jung
​
PhD in Music and Music Technology
Centre for Research in New Music
University of Huddersfield
jungin.j@gmail.com
[28] McGregor demonstrated how he transfer his movement idea to his dancers at the TEDGlobal 2012 with his problem-solving method. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/wayne_mcgregor_a_choreographer_s_creative_process_in_real_time - t-483415 (Accessed: 11th April 2018).
1.3. Dialogue between dance and music
My second research question was ‘Once I have considered the sounds to be used in a piece, how should I direct dancers to create choreography as well as sound composition with my interactive system?’ My background research (see Section 1.1) indicates that the primary concern in research so far into new interface design for dance has focused on the kinds of motion that can be captured to control musical parameters, either in one-to-one or more complex interactions. However, this prevalent concern in mapping body movement to sound is limited to musicians and computer scientists (Wilson-Bokowiec and Bokowiec, 2006: 48), and rarely takes account of a purely choreographic perspective. My purpose in this research is not necessarily to hand over control of the music to the dancers. Rather, my main interest is in what kind of dialogue can be created between music and dance as a stimulus to collaborative composition, not necessarily that one medium has to determine the other.
In order to create a dialogue between music and dance it was essential to look at how they have served as impetuses for each other both historically and more recently. Traditionally choreographers made choreography for already written music, and dance had to be organised to synchronise with music that had been composed for it (Percival, 1971: 17). This is clearly demonstrated in the dance notation from the seventeenth century; as shown in Figure 1.22 the music notation is presented above the dance notation, and the alphabet letters indicate how to synchronise dance steps with each musical note (Weaver, 1706). However, since the twentieth century, there have been huge changes in this traditional relationship. Vaslav Nijinsky premiered the ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune in 1912, using Claude Debussy’s music “purely as an accompaniment”. This was to demonstrate that the music and the stage design were “equally important in setting a mood” and “equally irrelevant to the movements being performed by the dancers, except that the total length of the action was determined by that of the music” (Percival, 1971: 16). Around the same time, Laban choreographed to a very minimalistic use of percussive musical instruments or sometimes even in silence so as to preserve dance as an independent art form, as seen in his works Die Geblendeten (1921) and Der Schwingende Tempel (1922) (Laban, 1975: 89, 96). Laban did not agree with the dance theatre tradition of that time, according to which dance had to be organised as a literal translation of music (Laban, 1975: 175–179). Later, from the late 1940s, Cunningham and Cage started collaborating using methods of indeterminacy and chance, treating music and dance as independent entities (Au, 2002: 155–156). From my research on interactive music and dance collaboration, the most frequently referenced example as the origin of interactive music and dance collaboration is Cage and Cunningham’s Variations V (1965), yet notoriously they did not seek to connect expressive musicality and movement. In contrast to these movements, music and dance had a close relationship in Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), with Lucinda Childs juxtaposing slow and almost static movements to Glass’s fast and repetitive music (Obenhaus, 1985). Similarly, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was deeply influenced by Steve Reich’s music structure, and choreographed repeated and contrapuntal movement variations for her work Fase, Four Movements to The Music of Steve Reich (1982) (Figure 1.23). However, De Keersmaeker explains that although Reich’s music “supplied a number of principles of construction”, her work “did not copy the musical structure” (De Keersmaeker and Cvejić, 2012: 25–27). As a more recent example, at the 2012 Dance Biennale, Forsythe explained that his dance company uses music like “film music”; music can “colour the perception of the event”, but it is not necessary to organise a dance according to the structure of the music (Forsythe, 2012).
Figure 1.22. The first printed dance notation was invented by Pierre Beauchamps, and published in the book Chorégraphie by Raoul Auger Feuillet (Au, 2002: 26). The example is from the English translation version by John Weaver, published in 1706, and shows how dance steps and musical notes are indicated in synchronisation with the alphabet letters.
Figure 1.23: This is the choreographic score of the second movement in Fase, Four Movements to The Music of Steve Reich (1982). Two dancers’ contrapuntal movement variation is created for Reich’s Come Out (1966) (De Keersmaeker and Cvejić, 2012: 40).
It seems natural to have these constant changes in dance from the twentieth century in particular, since music has also actively changed into various unconventional and uncountable forms through the use of new materials and sound (Cunningham, 1968; Percival, 1971: 15). However, in gesture-driven music and dance research I feel these kinds of dialogues between music and dance have been neglected because “interactivity” is considered a crucial element that has to be demonstrated to the audience. This view can easily restrict interactive dance to the folly of mere demonstrations of technology, and fail to make use of it as choreographic tool. Furthermore, what I could see from the dance notations from the seventeenth century (Figure 1.22) and De Keersmaeker’s score (Figure 1.23) was how these two media have changed from rather absolute and common code to abstract ideas. The dance notation from the seventeenth century indicates positions of feet and limbs related precisely to the musical notes, whereas De Keersmaeker’s score is drawn with more abstract shapes, directional marks, and numbers. As I wrote in the Introduction to this commentary, at the beginning of my previous collaboration with contemporary dancers I mostly sought ways to orientate the dancers towards the interactive system to help them perform better “sound”. However, I was aware of the irony in teaching the abstract ideas of music composition to dancers. Instead, I thought these abstract ideas could be bridged through a concrete medium – for me, it was what the restrictive motion-tracking technology could serve – to successfully conduct this interdisciplinary collaborative composition.
Nevertheless, in interactive sound and dance collaborations the dancers need time to try out the system to learn how their movement affects the sound composition. This learning process is unavoidable as reorienting and restructuring experience through interaction with the system is a significant part of the aesthetic in interactive art. However, I wanted to ease the learning curve and tried to integrate the Gametrak controllers into the choreographic movement tasks. I proposed using the Gametrak controllers as a visual stimulus and physical restriction (see Section 1.2) to my main collaborating dancer Katerina Foti. As she was aware of Forsythe’s approach she was interested in the method. Yet, this was my first time composing an interactive music with physical restriction, and I thought the best way to find out the most suitable compositional method was simply to try them out.
Locus was my first composition, and contains four different sections of sound throughout time. I planned several steps to guide Foti and another dancer Natasha Pandermali to gradually construct a choreographic composition with my interactive sound synthesis. Video 1.1 demonstrates the composition process. First, I asked the two dancers to tether four cables each to their bodies and to improvise to find out how to move within the restrictive conditions without sound. Second, once they got used to moving within the conditions, I then provided more specific choreographic tasks section by section depending on the structure of the sound composition. During this process, the dancers proposed how they would create choreography with my movement tasks and I selected good materials. Finally, we repeated the proposing, selecting, and modifying process several times until we completed the composition (more detailed composition process is explained in Section 2.1.2).
My dancers quickly adapted my composition process as they were trained with similar choreographic techniques. This way of proposing and selecting choreographic materials is the common approach in contemporary dance nowadays, as exemplified by the choreographers Forsythe and McGregor. While I was searching for the origin of this choreographic method, I found that some contemporary dance choreographers in the 1960s used the so-called problem-solving concept as research in information theory and artificial intelligence awakened around that time (Rosenberg, 2017: 185–186). This technique adopted improvisation as a choreographic compositional method. For example, the Judson Church group choreographer Trisha Brown first provides movement tasks to her dancers and the dancers create movement in response to them. Second, Brown “intervenes as a composer to select, edit, and reorganize this raw material as choreography” (Rosenberg, 2017: 185). The consulting historical scholar at Trisha Brown Dance Company, Susan Rosenberg, writes that “Brown cast her dancers into what problem-solving theorists call a ‘problem space’ defined by an ‘initial state, a goal state, and a set of operators that can be applied that will move the solver from one state to another’” (Rosenberg, 2017: 186). This algorithmic process is also apparent in Forsythe’s choreographic procedure Alphabet (Figure 1.24) (Forsythe and Kaiser, 1999) and McGregor’s “if, then, if, then” process[28] (McGregor, 2012).
Figure 1.24: Forsythe’s choreographic procedure Alphabet used for Eidos : Telos (Forsythe and Kaiser, 1999).
I also find similar algorithmic thinking in Simon Emmerson’s model of compositional process. Since electroacoustic music does not use traditional musical notation systems and materials, Emmerson (1989) writes about composing strategies and pedagogy, and proposes a compositional model for contemporary music (Figure 1.25). The model consists of a cycle of actions: the composer does an action drawn from an action repertoire, which then has to be tested. After testing, accepted materials reinforce the action repertoire and rejected ones can be modified for the action or not. Emmerson explains that research begins when one “tests” the action, and new actions need to be fed into the action repertoire to evolve the research further (Emmerson, 1989: 136). Similar to Brown’s technique, John Young (2015: 159) describes the process after testing in Emmerson’s model, in which the composer decides whether to accept or reject materials, as a “problem-defining and problem-solving process”.
Video 1.1: The demonstration of composition process of Locus.
Figure 1.25: A model of composition process by Simon Emmerson (1989: 138).
The unique compositional feature of Emmerson’s model is that there is the test procedure. Emmerson explains this in “the composer/listener chain”: the test has to be done with a group of listeners – not any listeners, but a “community of interest whose views we trust and value” – since there is no common code for building the same expectation as there used to be in traditional (Western) music (Emmerson, 1989: 142). In my composition process my collaborating dancers are not only the performers, but also the primary listeners as they devise choreography that interacts with my sound system. We try a certain condition, explore our experience, and reflect on the next phase. Therefore, one composition is completed with multiple iterations of these actions; furthermore, my entire research is structured within this action cycle. For instance, some aesthetics tested during the pre-studies were reflected to the major works. Some experiments in my previous major works also affected my decision-making process with my collaborators during my next major work. Figure 1.26 is my adaptation of Emmerson’s model of composition process to choreographic sound composition.
Figure 1.26: My adaptation of Emmerson’s model of composition process to choreographic sound composition.
Here, I offer some examples to demonstrate how I mapped movement and my sound synthesis. To prevent the dancers from being too busy dealing with just the musical functions of the technology, I first reduced the number of sound parameters to be performed by the dancers. Mostly only the z (length) values of the Gametrak controllers were used to control the sound parameters; sometimes the x and y values were used to in support to detect more specific locations of the dancers in the performance space (in Video 1.2 I explain how the Gametrak controller works and programmed in Max to receive data). Although I simplified the number of sound parameters each controller could control, I provided different choreographic tasks strictly in order of the allocated time frames. I also wanted to have both direct and indirect interactions between movement and sound so that the dancers could have various conditions within which to devise choreography with differing amounts of freedom.
Video 1.2: The video explains how a Gametrak controller works and how movement data can be received in Max via Arduino.
Video 1.3 demonstrates the compositional process of Pen-Y-Pass with different choreographic tasks throughout time. For the first section of the composition the dancers were asked to tether cables to their limbs, moving only one arm at first and then gradually use all their limbs. Movement and sound had a direct one-to-one relationship here, and the dancers had to be careful not to move their other limbs from the beginning. As a result, the silent space gradually filled with more and more sounds. For the second part, the dancers were asked to attach one part of their body as though their limbs were extended diagonal lines tethered like the cables as well as the projected visual work behind them. Then the dancers tried to extend their limbs towards the gaps between their bodies. In this section, the dancers’ limbs only affected the volume of the sound files, allowing the dancers to focus more on devising choreography. For the third part, they were asked to detach the cables, leaving only one cable each. In this section, there were only two different sounds, one for each dancer, with one-to-one interaction. The dancers were asked to create a circle with their movements and then pause for a while, and repeat this movement. As a result, some silence was created in between. For the fourth section, the dancers were asked to attach one more cable to their limbs, making two for each dancer. One dancer was asked to perform solo, and then the other, and then duet until the end. For this section I programmed different sounds depending on the length of the cables. In return, the more the dancers moved towards the other side and crossed with each other, the louder and more dynamic became the sound.
Video 1.3: Composition process of Pen-Y-Pass.
For other works, I created more game-like tasks between movement and dance. For example, I attached the cables of Gametraks to two chairs in Temporal (Video 1.4). For the second section of the piece I mapped sounds to be randomly triggered at various locations in the performance space. The dancers were asked to move in response to what they heard. As a result, they moved around the room holding chairs and sometimes even dragging them to make a scratching noise. Depending on the triggered sound, the dancers created dynamic movements from fast to slow. Another example is The Music Room, and here sound worked also as a restriction to control the dancer’s movement (Video 1.5). I programmed some piano notes to be triggered when the cables were pulled to a certain length. The dancers were asked to stop moving once the piano notes were triggered, and to wait until the note had finished playing. As a consequence, the dancer moved very carefully and created cautious and slow movement variations.