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
I found that working with a group of dancers was a challenge as each of them had different levels of understanding about interactive technology and experimental music. Also, when everybody performed together, they had hard time distinguishing the sounds mapped for each of them. Therefore, I mostly sought ways to orientate the dancers to perform better with the sound system at the beginning of the residency. Without any guidance, it was very easy for the dancers’ actions to result in sonic chaos. The experience of interaction prompted them simply to activate the system without enough consideration of the sound produced. To address this problem, I organised a ‘listening workshop’ with Murphy to let the dancers become aware of environmental sound and how it worked in soundscape composition. We also wanted to encourage the dancers to be more mindful when they triggered sound with movement, but it was unfair to expect them to gain enough awareness of sound composition in that short amount of time.
Introduction
The key moment for the development of my research was a one-month residency I did with the choreographer Skye Reynolds and a group of dancers at the Dance Base studio in Edinburgh in 2011 with the support from the composer Pippa Murphy and the sound artist Yann Seznec (Figure 0.1). Reynolds wanted to work with wearable interactive technologies, and at the time the most affordable wireless motion-tracking technology was the Nintendo Wii Remote controller. To incorporate the movement data from dancers, I started working with the computer music programming environment Max [1]. Movement data to Max was sent by Wii Remote controllers attached to the dancers' limbs with the armbands designed by Seznec. Because of the limited amount of time we had for the residency, I mapped some sound by imagining possible movements using the Wii remote controllers in Max before I met the dancers. Once the residency started, I tried it with the dancers and some features were added or removed depending on how well the mapping worked.
Figure 0.1: An image from the residency at Dance Base in Edinburgh in 2011 capturing the contrasting (active and still) movements from two dancers. (Photograph by Colin Chipchase)
In this commentary, I explain the creative process of my dance and sound compositions mediated by interactive technology, which I call choreographic sound composition. I should emphasise that what drives me to create interactive systems is the facilitation of a dialogue between the sound system and the dancer, to devise choreography and sound works together. According to the choreographer Wayne McGregor, creating choreography is a “physical thinking process” (McGregor, 2012). He believes that we are all experts in physical thinking in everyday life, but are rarely aware of it unless we have body problems. The aim of using Gametrak controllers in my choreographic sound composition was to cause physical problems with its restrictive characteristic, and consequently to provoke the cognitive physical thinking process. In turn this technology became the crucial communication method with my dancers to create the synthesis between dance and sound.
As a result, Reynolds suggested to try another method that encouraged them to ‘think how to move first before making sound’. For instance, Reynolds asked them to move all at the same time and then stop, and I checked the sound results. Then, Reynolds asked one dancer to start moving and the others to step in one-by-one, and I listened the results. Finally, I listened to what happened when only two people danced, and then when only three people danced… this was the most effective way to control the proportion of sound and silence triggered by the system. As a result of this experience I realised that using movement and relational interaction of this kind had significant potential for my work.
The residency ended, but there were still some unresolved issues for me. The movement tasks we provided to the dancers were effective, but not provoked by the interactive technology we used. They were a pragmatic solution given such a short period of development time to create an interdisciplinary work. But I was left questioning, how did the technology itself stimulate choreographic movement in the end? What kind of technology would have been a better fit to integrate movement tasks to generate choreographic sound composition? As a consequence, this experience persuaded me to do further research on these issues.