Introducing A Performer's Perspective: an interactive online documentary

[Shannon Cuykendall]

I am pleased to announce the release of A Performer's Perspective, an interactive online documentary that transmits the perspectives of three dancers in Judith Garay's multimedia dance work THE FINE LINE ~ twisted angels.

The overarching goal of this project is to translate and extend one’s perceptions of dance movement while also exploring how interaction and digital technology can be utilized to better communicate bodily knowledge to a broad audience.

The design of the site is inspired by a close reading analysis I conducted of The Synchronous Objects website (published in the MOCO  2014 conference proceedings) and seeks to present the dancer’s data through three interactive categories: instructional, exploratory, and translational.

 

The Instructional portion of the website includes reflections from the performers in selected scenes from THE FINE LINE~twisted angels and short documentary videos related to the making of the THE FINE LINE ~twisted angels and each dancer’s perspective: Vanessa Goodman, Bevin Poole, and Antonio Somera. 

In the Exploratory section we visualize the dancers’ movement data, collected with various motion sensors such as, the Myo armband and the Microsoft Kinect camera.  In future versions of the site, this section will be expanded to include more options for viewers to interact with the data.

The Translational section re-imagines the dancers’ data through varying artistic representations including music, animations, and visualizations. 

I am extremely grateful to the design/implementation team that has made the creation of this site possible including: Omid Alemi, Ethan Soutar-Rau, Theo Wong, Linda Nguyen, Professor Thecla Schiphorst, and the many other researchers that helped out along the way. Please see full credits here.

This project is still in development and if you have suggestions or ideas for future collaborations I would love to hear from you!