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
Conclusion
Since I started collaborating with contemporary dancers, several questions have been aroused in my head. Eventually these led me to start my PhD research. At the beginning of my collaborations, it was simply exciting to see how my sound compositions could be realised with the dancers’ movement in real-time. But I had to ask what made my compositional use of interactive technology valuable. To answer this, I investigated in the history of dance and technology up to the present time to understand what were the main contexts of using technology in different periods of time.
Based on this investigation, I sought ways to integrate interactive technology into the choreographic process rigorously to create my sound composition rather than merely to receive movement data as an interface. I therefore studied the choreographic methods of some choreographers I liked, to understand how contemporary dance works are structured. My aim was to understand the basic principles and stimuli of contemporary dance so that I could introduce technology into the making process. As a consequence, I stopped looking for more sophisticated technology to achieve more accurate motion-tracking results, and decided to dedicate my entire practice to using the tactile and visible vintage Gametrak controllers. In this collaboration I wanted to use interactive technology rather casually as a tool with which to compose a work together with my collaborating dancers, not to create representational works of dance movement data in another medium. Perhaps this might be the result of my consideration of what a true post-digital approach would be as a result of listening and watching glitch artworks at the beginning of my research.
Using the Gametrak controllers, I restricted the size and shape of the dancers’ kinesphere. This primarily challenged them to move around the restrictive environment in response to my choreographic tasks, which was not a typical performance condition for them. I tried to push their limits so that they would find new movement materials beyond their habits. This process naturally affected the resulting sound composition as well. I strove to use a more intuitive language for the dancers for my directed improvisation so as to compose in collaboration in such a way that the interactive system benefited both dance and sound composition. This required me to carefully balance the point of control and non-control in terms of directing the improvisation so that we could preserve the simultaneity of movement and sound, and also evolve dramaturgy during the composition process using the interactive system.
Locus was my fresh start in this research to test whether my compositional approach was convincing for my collaborating dancers (see Section 2.1.2). Throughout this piece, I observed how restriction affected the dancers’ awareness of their bodies and the performance space. I tried to elaborate the technical aspects of Locus in my next piece Pen-Y-Pass. However, after completing Pen-Y-Pass, I found this piece was the least successful. This was because I had prefixed the narrative and the choreographic tasks without giving the dancers enough freedom to evolve something new out of the process (see Section 2.2.2). In the end, the result was a rather representational work of my trip to Pen-y-Pass. In Temporal, I decided to use other objects – two chairs – in addition to the Gametrak controllers. I found that the chairs became a medium through which to create double enforcement for the restriction as well as to evolve dramaturgy (see Section 2.3.2). For me, my final work The Music Room was the most well demonstrated piece in terms of using restrictions with interactive sound synthesis. Here the sound triggered by the dancer also restricted her movement, creating stillness, and the corner of the room became a physical enforcement to restrict the size and shape of her kinesphere (see Section 2.4.1).
My contribution to knowledge in the field of interactive dance with computer music is that I offer a rather different compositional approach by integrating motion-tracking devices as a primarily choreographic tool for dancers based on the investigation into contemporary dance composition methods. As a consequence, I have tried to broaden the dominant engineering perspective in interactive dance to include creative composition process in collaboration with professionally trained contemporary dancers. I believe it is crucial to investigate other art media which I have not practised, primarily in collaborative and interdisciplinary composition. Music and dance have served as impetuses for each other and have shared similar qualities. They are both reproductions of physical energy in the time domain. However, the more I got to know about these two media through this research, the more I came to realise that they are very different when it comes to performance, and require different physical skills. Thus, this research was my journey towards understanding the basic principles of the two media in portraying the present time of art with technology and my efforts to structure them as composition.
I hope to expand this study to examine the technologies already existing around us for their intrinsic choreographic structures, which under our current conditions of rapid technological progress may not yet have been fully discovered. Furthermore, I would like to continue to develop my choreographic sound composition methods further using various other technologies than the Gametrak controllers, including objects and architecture, to seek ways to stimulate my collaborating dancers’ awareness of the relationship between body, space, and sound.