Critical Movement Practice on Empyre

[Ashley]

Everyone should check out -empyre- on "Critical Movement Practice" this month. Guests include Stamatia Portanova, Johannes Birringer, Laura Cull, Sarah Drury, Erin Manning, Nora Zuniga Shaw, Stelarc and myself. Click here to join in the discussion!

Below is my introductory post:

Hello everyone! What an exciting opportunity to engage with this
topic, Critical Movement Practice in such an open forum and for such a
generous period of time. I do hope that many people from many
perspectives get involved in what I am sure will prove to be an
interesting discussion. To start things off I will share some thoughts
on my artistic work and academic scholarship, if you will allow me to
temporarily bifurcate these two inseparable aspects of my career. As a
choreographer who has a particular interest in digital media, I
explore real-time dancer/audience interactions with digital
performance technologies including live video motion tracking and
motion tracking sensors. My work with this technology has led me to
question how digitally facilitated movements impact our physical
awareness and stand relative to dance history. As a female
choreographer, I find relationships between dance history and digital
technologies particularly important as I consider social relations
that might instantiate a classically masculinized audience gaze.
Projection screens, for example, can hang to segment a stage,
consequently obstructing the audience’s view. This can empower a
dancer to appear and disappear, or join the audience in watching
projected images. The performer can transcribe the space between
audience members, screen and projection thereby destabilizing an
otherwise objectifying gaze. Doesn’t this seems like such a simple
answer to an audience/dancer relationship that choreographers have
worked to deconstruct for decades?! Even with the introduction of a
destabilizing projection, though, the relationship remains more
complicated.

In order to consider examples of how our everyday movements and
technologies can both inspire and complicate dance choreography, I
often turn to my experiences as an audience member, choreographer,
performer and theorist as one moving/thinking body to complicate a
historical situation of dance history alongside technology. By
considering my experience as an audience member and in the
choreographic and performance process, I hope to clarify whether or
not digital projection and presence can open the gaze and defuse the
subsequent objectification of a dancer. In doing so, I explore how
digital technologies can inspire and re-open my conceptions of what
choreographing corporeal technology can be, or is. This research also
often consists of philosophical perspectives ranging from
phenomenological to deconstructionist to historiographical standpoints
among others. As we write about critical movement practice I hope that
we can think not only about questions surrounding the dance
performance space, that we think also about how we write theory that
speaks to, or is movement and practice movement that speaks to, or is
theory.