dance and technology: a pas de deux for post-humans

Dance and Technology: A Pas de Deux for Post-HumansAuthor(s): Kent de SpainSource: Dance Research Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Summer, 2000), pp. 2-17Published by: Congress on Research in DanceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1478270 .

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Dance and Technology: A Pas de Deux for Post-humans

Kent De Spain

Introduction Encounter #1 Hand-drawn Spaces I step around the corner and into a small room, pitch black except for the dull glow of three projection screens; the center one flat in front of me, the other two angling out like welcoming arms reaching to the edges of the darkness. I stay back, keeping what distance is allowed me, so I can take it all in. With little fanfare, a figure moves into view. The figure is clearly a representation of a human, a biped whose movement quality is instinctually recognizable, yet it lacks all of the features by which we categorize and contextualize in that instant of perceiving an "other." (Check the order of your personal list and see how you were socialized-Gender? Age? Race? Ability?) Instead, this figure is formed, or perhaps I should say indicated, by lines: a chest cavity of swirling blue; a kinked, mustard-yellow appendage extending out from what seem like perpetually hunched shoulders.

From even a few feet away I feel a bit detached from this "dancer" Lacking individuality in the way I am used to experiencing it, I don't feel compelled to attend to its dancing. So I step closer Here, almost surrounded by the screens, my customary fourth wall protection is lost. As if on stage, I finally join this dance, beginning to feel some of that sense, that connection-my body to your body, your moving to my moving-that has kept me in this field through many lean years. Yet who am I connecting with?

More figures begin to appear and disappear: some retreat out of sight; some seem to step off into the darkness only to emerge on a different screen; and some eerily advance at me, growing into looming giants just moments before fading into darkness. It's as if they are attempting to leave their screened-in world, but disappointed to find themselves no more than projected pixels of light. I realize that there is sound-footfall and a blaring synthesized something-or-other-but I have blocked it out while attempting to "feel" these digital movers. Only when a quiet voice breaks in do I really take notice. It's Merce, and it seems like he is just offstage somewhere, his invisible presence directing the digital action, with a "two, three, four, five..."

In Hand-drawn Spaces, a 1998 collaboration between Merce Cunningham, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar, dance and the emerging medium of digital art come together to birth a new form of...well, that seems to be the question...of what? Hand-drawn Spaces is a beautifully executed example of the kind of melding of movement and technology that is changing the face of dance as we know it. While dance has always used the ultimate technology-the human body-to create magic through human movement, and although aspects of invented technology (e.g., stage machinery, pointe

Kent De Spain has been a choreographer, improviser, and multidisciplinary artist for over twenty years. He has taught and toured throughout the United States, including performances at Jacob's Pillow, Judson Church, and the North Carolina Dance Festival; he has been the recipient of several awards, including the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and an Established Choreographers Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is presently a Research Fellow in Dance at Ohio State University where he is directing an improvisational performance ensemble. De Spain holds an Ed.D. from Temple University. He is writing and editing a book on issues surrounding dance and technology.

2 Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000)



shoes, theatrical lighting, recorded or amplified sound) have been used to produce or enhance various effects during the performance of dances for decades, even centuries, choreographers are now routinely exploring and incorporating a slew of new technologies which only twenty years ago might have sounded like science fiction. Recent advances in computing (particularly digital imaging, MIDI interfaces, and the Internet) are fundamentally changing the way many dance artists create, present, and document their work. Computers have even become a tool with which people who have never danced themselves can organize and edit, essentially choreograph, digital movement- based works. Envision a brave new world with digital dances that choreograph themselves, "new" works by deceased artists, or surgically-altered cyborgian super-dancers, and you are more likely picturing next month rather than next decade. The philosophi- cal and aesthetic challenges presented by some of the work now combining dance with new technologies can be so profound that critics, scholars, and even the artists themselves will be forced to redefine and reassess how they understand and interpret dance in our culture.

For many people in the dance mainstream, these changes may come as a sur- prise, but for years now a handful of choreographers and technologists (sometimes these are one and the same) have been twiddling in basements, sitting in front of glow- ing screens, and dragging unidentifiable gear into out-of-the-way studios. Often, their vision of the possible connection between dancing and various aspects of technology has required them to adopt, adapt, re-program, or re-think, equipment and software clearly designed for other purposes. Their initial experiments have often been crude approximations of desired effects, fraught with glitches and short-circuits, but with each new generation of equipment, the difficult interface between dance and technology has become more and more seamless.

As is often the case, critical and scholarly engagement with these changes has been lagging a step or two behind the technological and aesthetic advances. Perhaps writers have understandably been waiting for the quality of the experimentation to achieve professional production standards, or to observe the place these new works would assume within the culture of dance. But interest is now peaking. During the past year, the cutting edge of dance and technology has leapt into public awareness thanks, in large part, to three high-profile collaborations initiated by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, who together form the Manhattan-based Riverbed Studios. In addition to Hand- drawn Spaces, described above, they have also recently completed Biped, again with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching with Bill T. Jones (1). By combining the latest/ greatest computing technology (motion-capture, figure animation, and much more) with major choreographers already experienced at incorporating technology into their works, these three pieces have attracted attention both within and beyond the dance world, and have been previewed, reviewed, and discussed extensively in both print and electronic media. That media exposure, though, has focused primarily on what they did and how they did it, ignoring the broader critical issues concerning what this kind of work means within an aesthetic and sociocultural context.

As both a practitioner and a theorist working the dance/technology interface, I have been very interested in identifying opportunities and strategies for furthering dialogue among artists, theorists, critics, and historians concerning the use of new technologies in dance (2). This article will examine the three Riverbed collaborations mentioned above in an attempt to articulate both the technology and its critical implications. Consistent with my research aesthetic, I have engaged myself experientially with the pieces and conversationally with the artists, hoping through that process to develop a deeper reading of the issues. What follows, due to limitations of both space and mind, does not cover all of the issues that need to be raised but simply offers a set of leading questions which looks to the field for answers.

Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000) 3



Plate 1. From the world premiere of Biped, Merce Cllnningham Dance Company, Berkeley, California. (Copyright Stephanie Berger.)

What Is It? Before any questions can be asked, it seems necessary to explain just what technology is being used and how it is being applied to the creation and presentation of new "dance" works. In the case of the collaborators under scrutiny here, Kaiser and Eshkar have not come to these projects from backgrounds in dance. Instead, they might best be considered experts in motion-based computer graphics, coming to computers through film (Kaiser) and visual arts (Eshkar). They excel at creating virtual 3-D spaces within which animated figures and/or the viewer's disembodied point-of-view are moved (3).

Hand-drawn Spaces, the first of the three collaborations to be completed, was created through the following process: Merce Cunningham choreographed a series of seventy-one "phrases" of movement and taught them to two of his dancers. Those dancers were then taken into a motion-capture studio where sensors were placed at key points on their bodies so that, while they moved, a series of cameras connected to a computer could digitally map their dancing (seen as a series of moving dots on a screen). These dots were then translated onto semi-humanoid animated figures (think of the blocky outline of a human) which could be extensively manipulated by the collaborators (e.g., facings, order of phrases, transitions, direction of travel, and whether the virtual dancer's movements were to be visible-on screen-at a given moment). So, essentially, the final version of the work was choreographed on the computer. That, in itself, is not unusual. Cunningham has spent most of the past decade choreographing with the aid of the Life Forms computer program. The difference here is that there was never any intention to eventually translate the finished choreography back onto live




dancers. The final "performers" of this work are beautiful hand-drawn figures created directly on the computer by Shelley Eshkar. Ghostcatching (a digital work projected onto a single screen) and the digital portion of Biped (with projections on a transparent scrim through which the audience can also see live dancers) were created through essentially the same methods.

So in what ways does work arising from these new technologies challenge our existing understanding of dance? Hand-drawn Spaces is an excellent example of what has been called by some "virtual dance" (4). Virtual dances may or may not have ever existed in "real" time and space, and the "dancers" may be images of humans, human- like figures, or even non-human shapes and objects. Computer-based virtual dance seems to be expanding on the aesthetic ground mapped out by its technological cousins, video-dance and film-dance (5). Structurally, these forms all share the ability to manipulate the viewer's experience of time and space through film-style editing, layering and/ or sequencing any kind of image. They diverge in that film and video, with some important experimental exceptions, have tended to use camera-captured images of actual humans as their primary dancing subjects, while virtual dance seems more willing to expand the definition of "dancer," taking advantage of the graphic design capabilities of the computer. Another interesting change is that computers have permitted virtual dance creators to push beyond the "cut" of film-style editing. In all three of their pieces, Kaiser and Eshkar used software-based algorithmic processes which allowed them to have the computer interpolate the movements necessary for their dancing figure to decide for itself how to maneuver smoothly from the end of one sequence to the beginning of another, even if that involved a significant shift in both shape and position.

The first and perhaps most fundamental question regarding virtual dance should now be addressed: Is it dance? Paul Kaiser does not see his pieces as dance, preferring to think of them as a new form melding dance and drawing and filmmaking. But the Cunningham Company website trumpets Hand-drawn Spaces as "the first dance for the computer by a major choreographer" where viewers can "enter a virtual hand-drawn world in which abstract dancers perform a full and completely new Cunningham work." After his experience working on Ghostcatching, Bill T. Jones addressed the question in the following way:

It's a very provocative issue, because I was thinking I would agree with the people who say that it's not dance, but we have to be careful that we don't get left behind, or that we don't miss an opportunity to share what we know about the human body and what we love about live performance, share it with the future; and that we don't become so protective of this little domain that we have which, as we know, is undervalued and underfunded, that we don't have the courage to step out. (6)

Can we, should we, based on our culture's present understanding, accept these works as dance? If so, fine. If not, how will our new understandings be constructed in the future as we encounter more, and more extreme, examples of the form? Will we eventually expand our conception of dance until any piece in any medium (or combina- tion of media) which involves the exploration of movement fits under a broad dance umbrella? Or will some aspect of this work, or perhaps the lack of some aspect, eventually determine that we categorize it as something else? Is it even necessary to make such distinctions, given that dance probably extracts some of its cultural staying power by exploiting the definitional margins of the performance world?

At times during the past year there has been a heated debate concerning this very issue raging on the Dance and Technology listserv (an e-mail message board primarily subscribed to by dance artists and techno-artists working in this area) (7). Perhaps this indicates that, for the first time since the heady days of Judson Church and the Happenings, we are entering an era where artists, critics, and scholars of dance will




be penning manifestos, taking sides, and observing new work in a constant state of ontological indeterminacy. The post-sixties retrenchment in dance offered no such challenge. The minor scuffles over so-called "victim art" and other work based in the personal stories of the socio-economically marginalized were brief and relatively bloodless. Even the potentially fundamental challenge of a shrinking world community and the accompanying exposure to dances from dozens of other cultures has been so effectively framed by Keali'inohomoku and others as an "etic/emic" debate that we readily accept very foreign material with the understanding that to "them," it is dance. But virtual dance and other forms of dance/technology, arising from within our own culture and, in the near future if not already, from a new kind of worldwide cybercul- ture, might force us to make new kinds of choices:

Must dance exist within what we might call "real" space? Well, in many ways throughout history, performances of dance have occurred in a special space, a magical, sociocultural space we might call the "dance space," where representation and "reality" freely mingle and transform. Will we extend the "dance space" into the representative spaces of computing?

Must dance involve humans? Are the dances of birds and bees merely meta- phorical? Can imagined creatures dance? Haven't humans, through the transformative power of dancing, become both animals and imagined creatures, gods and tricksters and spirits? Real or imagined, must dances be danced by creatures, or will we accept and attempt to interpret a computer-based dance of shapes and colors?

If "humanity" is important, how will we define what is human and what is not in an era of increasingly extensive and invasive biotechnology? Will what is imaginable on a computer become what is demanded on a stage, and will the dancers who try to fulfill that vision be forced to resort to more and more medical assistance to improve or repair their overtaxed bodies? Or should we be wary that motion-capture, with its potential for creating a detailed map of individual movement characteristics, could be added to an expanding list of technologies (retinal scans, MRIs, DNA mapping) taking on Foucauldian implications of social identification and discipline (8)?

Should a motion-captured documentation of an existing live, human dance (later viewed on computer as performed by digital dancers) also be considered a dance? If so, is it the same dance as the live version it is based on, or is it somehow different? As historians and critics look at technological documents as the only accessible versions of dances from distant times or places, how will they identify and interpret the nature of that difference (9)?

Why not simply reach out welcoming arms to encompass all movement under the aegis of dance? Why should the technology affect the ontology if movement is the essence of the work? I have personally argued for what might be called a "medium- based" (as opposed to a movement-based) criteria for parsing the dance from the dance- related, because film and video and graphical computers have as much claim to being movement-based media as does dance (10). How do we experience and interpret the art we are exposed to, especially when it crosses disciplinary boundaries? Whether in- tended as documentation or as stand-alone art, when dance is captured on film or video or computer it has an extra layer of mediation which adds complexity and shifts the focus of our experience. The connection between the moving and the representation of the moving might be seamless, but there also might be a schism in our somatic experience of the moving based on the manipulation of the elements of the medium. What choices were made? Subject, angles, framing, editing, etc.? And how are we seeing the piece? On a monitor? Projected onto a giant screen? At home on the couch with a remote control in our hands? Why does it matter where and how we experience a dance? To recognize a piece for whatever it is, in essence to "name" it, allows us to engage with it in culturally or critically appropriate ways. At the same time, it also delimits our experience of it, ensuring that we will probably miss aspects of the work which might be important to someone else. We want to, and try to, be as open to new




Plate 2. From the world premiere of Biped, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Berkeley, California. (Copyright Stephanie Berger.)




work as we can, but to imagine that we could see it without in some way "naming" it is to deny the always, already acculturated nature of our perceptions.

Regardless of how our culture's conception of dance in technological media is eventually constructed, it is not only aesthetic but pragmatic (read: institutional) consid- erations that will rest on the outcome of the debate. Within higher education, where will the computers be housed and who will teach students how to use them? Three of the leading dance and technology programs in the United States (Ohio State University, Arizona State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison) have settled on a happy medium, having technology resources and expertise within the departments themselves but also having close affiliations with multidisciplinary technology programs or centers (11). But overcoming structural challenges does not settle the pressing issues facing dance education in the age of technology. As with so many other fields in our information-besotted culture, dance departments are being severely challenged in the allocation of educational capital. Technology is joining a growing list of "required" knowledge and skill acquisitions that directly compete for the limited time and energy resources of faculty and students in dance. For many programs there is simply no room to maneuver within the credit hours allocated to a dance major without cutting crucial courses (Effort/Shape, Dance Kinesiology, Dance in World Cultures?). Must the dancer/ choreographer of the future become a computer expert? If so, will students become more familiar with virtual bodies at the expense of knowing their own? If not, will movers have to rely on others for the expertise it takes to create quality work with new technologies?

Why Use It? For many dance artists the use of such technology may hold no specific appeal. After weighing issues of expense, a steep learning curve, and a smaller human presence within some portions of the creative process, choreographers might understandably opt to stay with more traditional approaches. Yet Hand-drawn Spaces involved Merce Cunningham, arguably our most important living choreographer. What can someone like Cunningham, with a company of top professional dancers at his disposal, gain from exploring computer-based technologies? He quickly dismissed one of the possible benefits:

With the computer one can make the figure do things the human body couldn't do. That doesn't basically interest me because I'm really concerned about people dancing.

When asked what is important to him about this work, he replied:

I think the possible discoveries. At least that's my personal feeling, that's what I use it for...It's the possible way you can see something in a way you haven't. It's something you've been dealing with all your life and you can see it in another way. And you say, "Oh, we can go further; we can go on." You always can, but what's difficult, often, is to find a way, or a clue as to how to do that...I think [technology] is absolutely a marvelous way to open your eyes again. (12)

The idea of vision is fundamental to Cunningham's understanding of the link between dancing and imaging technologies. He states:

My point was from the beginning that I thought [this technology] was visual, and I think dance is visual. So I put them together. What struck me immediately was the fact that you could see the figure...you didn't have to go through symbols, and you could see it in the same sense as a teacher showing you a step or a choreographer giving you a phrase. It as that direct to my eye.




But in choreographing with computers, Cunningham found more than just a new way to see movement. He also noticed a kind of aleatoric assist inherent in the process of working with new and unfamiliar technologies:

My experience, particularly with Life Forms, was that I kept coming up with things quite by accident because I didn't know how to use the apparatus. And I wondered if they would be possible. So I would try them out in class with students, and if one student [got] it, then I knew it could be done by humans...So it added a speed to my technique, to my company, I think, and a clarity about doing, say, one thing with the legs and something else with the arms; [something] which I had gone at in other ways, but Life Forms opened up other possibilities.

Working on Hand-drawn Spaces with Kaiser and Eshkar was another new experience for Cunningham. But while there was still an element of chance (Cunningham notes that, "Motion-capture can change the movement in so many interesting ways."), it was much less hands-on:

First of all, I had no direct access to the computer. Shelley and Paul did it, naturally, because the computer was so much more complicated and the ap- proach was entirely different. They always [asked], "well, what is it that you want?" But what I wanted to know was what it could do, so I could utilize it in different ways.

What became clear in the course of my conversation with Cunningham was that he values the process of working with new technologies even more than the works he eventually creates. When asked about that he simply said, "Oh yes. I mean, we make something and we put it out there to be seen, but I'm already thinking: What's next?"

How They Dance Encounter #2 Ghostcatching A figure, down on all fours, jerks and lurches like an angry dog. Formed by lines and impelled by Bill T Jones's improvisational moving, he (why does it seem like a he?) looks like some crazy relative of the virtual dancers in Hand-drawn Spaces, recently escaped from under lock and key. It seems cramped in his world as he moves among loose swirling strands of color, and we (our camera-like point of view) are close, un- comfortably close, and we seem to lurch with him to stay just out of his way. Jones's resonant voice half sings and half tells a tale hinting of sexual predation: "Wait, I want you to look here in the trunk. I have some cornbread in there for you." Am I to connect these beings, the disembodied voice and the dancer stripped of face and race, carved as they are from the wholeness which is Bill T. Jones? Do I read them as indicators of something more human, or must I simply take them at face(less) value, and not ask them to be more than they are?

There is something in the experience of the ghostly virtual dancers in these Kaiser/Eshkar pieces that strikes me as alternately compelling and distasteful; intriguing and troubling. And for these disembodied or, perhaps more accurately stated, alterna- tively embodied dancers to produce such an effect in me is a testament to the power of their dancing and to the accomplishments of their creators. Although these works could be accurately identified as dance "animations," these virtual beings cannot be dismissed as exaggerated Disney-esque caricatures of dancers. They don't quite communicate a sense of weight or momentum, but there is present a level of movement detail, frag- ments of quirky and unintentional shifts and balances caught by the motion-capture system, that lends them an eerie verisimilitude.




Plate 3. A still from the virtual dance installation Ghostcatching, 1999. (Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar.)

In Ghostcatching, which Paul Kaiser describes as "a kind of meditation on the possibilities and limitations of motion-capture," the dancer and the technology formed a critical mass which pushed virtual dancing another step toward the kinesthetic. Motion- capture is probably the oldest of the technologies under scrutiny here, but it is still very much a work-in-progress. A late-nineteenth-century French inventor, Etienne-Jules Marey, used reflective tape and serial photography to map the movements of gymnasts and others. The advent of computers and video cameras has updated Marey's method but, even with this new equipment, initial efforts were crude when measured against the detail and flow of live dancing. There is no question, though, that motion-capture, as it achieves its full potential, is becoming the tool that will allow dancing to enter the digital world with most of its movement integrity intact. And the day is not far off when




detailed, complex solo and group choreography will be accurately documented, allow- ing the movement to be viewed from any angle-a marked improvement on a one- or two-camera video shoot. The pragmatic drawback? The space and the technology make motion-capture staggeringly expensive. The aesthetic drawback (or is it a strength)? We can finally separate the dancer from the dance.

Primarily used commercially as a source of movement for video games, Holly- wood special effects, and for detailed analysis of sports technique, motion-capture was not ready for the specific problems presented by dance when Kaiser and Eshkar asked the Cunningham dancers, and then Bill T. Jones, to be "captured" (13). Early facilities had bare concrete floors, too few sensors, and sometimes bundles of cables which made it impossible to move freely (newer facilities such as Motion Uprising in Brooklyn, New York, are better equipped and have become more adept at working with dancers). For improvements to be made, limitations must be identified, so Kaiser and Eshkar specifi- cally sought out Bill T. Jones to challenge both the motion-capture technology and the new figure animation software they were testing to manipulate the results. Already known for his complex and athletic movement style, Jones was also asked to improvise his movements for the sessions, maximizing unpredictability. Jones describes his first motion-capture experience as follows:

The space was not particularly warm. The floor was hard. They hadn't really thought out the limitations of the sensors on my body...Sure enough, once I began to sweat [the sensors] would pop off and then everything would stop...And I said, "I don't think your technology can actually capture what I do." I ooze. I shudder. I undulate. I use my fingers. I use what I call micro- isolations. It was thrown down as a bit of a challenge on my part. "Take that. This is beyond your technology." It was a defensive stance.

But even after a difficult and "very frustrating" experience, Jones was surprised by what was gleaned from the session:

When I saw the dots swirling around on the computer screen later, I was mes- merized, and I was quite moved. Because, though there was no "body" there, that was my movement. It was different than video, it was disembodied, but there was something "true" in it, and I was respectful, more respectful, then.

Over the course of eighteen months and three different capture sessions with Jones, the technology and the facilities had improved so much that Kaiser and Eshkar even went back and replaced sections of Ghostcatching after the first version had premiered at Cooper Union in New York. But no matter how much the technology improves, no matter how detailed and accurate and kinesthetic the results of motion- capture become, the fundamental critical issue remains the same: motion-capture is a process which extracts movement from its human context.

From Human to Post-human Throughout our history, dance has been (arguably, I'm sure) the most "human" of the arts, by the simple logic that its medium of expression is the human body itself (14). Over the course of the past century, all of the arts saw an unprecedented acceleration in the abstraction of the materials and content of artistic media away from their origins in human culture and nature. Dance (probably seen as a bit backward because of it) has been a site of resistance because of the bodily essence of the medium. No matter how much one works to choreograph non-referential movement, it is ineluctably contexted and referenced through the somatic presence of the performer. In contrast to the visual arts, it might even be argued that minimalist or serialist experimentations in movement actually accentuate the humanism of the dancing. Enter technology.




Since the invention of imaging technologies in the mid to late nineteenth century, it has finally become possible to, in some sense, separate the dance from the body of the dancer (15). We probably did not recognize it as such initially. With photography, then film, then video, we saw images of ourselves performing shapes and movements we could directly correlate with the dances that had been documented. We failed to notice the incremental changes that technological special effects were having on our image (16). But now, who we see in our mirrors doesn't resemble these digital dancers we see on our monitors (at least not yet), and we must begin to acknowledge that we might have to engage with "dance" as a phenomenon distinct from the human performer. Why did this happen? Do we point the finger at technology? Or maybe modem- ism?

I think the roots go much deeper. The extraction of movement from its source in human movers is merely the latest step in a march that began when humankind scratched out the very first word. Literacy. The magic of writing was the technology that first separated human communication from the ephemerality of embodied linguistic practice (17). Humans had found a way to make communication last beyond the end of a spoken sentence, even beyond the end of a life. But the price they had to pay for this power was to separate the words from their living human context. Anyone who read the words later would have to supply for themselves whatever was lacking in communica- tive context: gestures, facial expression, tone of voice. Interpretation became less about a real-time negotiation of meaning between a sender and a receiver, and much more of a self-reflexive act. Technology (the printing press, the typewriter, the word processor) simply accelerated a process that had already developed its own momentum.

In the years since the advent of literacy, we have become proficient as a culture at manipulating and interpreting complex combinations of numbers or letters with very little contextual assistance. These are symbol systems that now have a long history of separation from specific human instantiation. But this strategy of separating message from messenger is clearly most effective for information that is the least context- sensitive, and has the most distinct and stable meaning. Does that work for movement?

Historically, meaning in dance might be seen as being derived from the relationship between kinesthetic sensations and human situations (or situations in which humans are representing, or have been possessed by, other humans or non-humans). Symbol-based systems for documenting dance movements have been developed, but they do not transmit kinesthetic sensations, nor do they adequately convey, in the act of "reading," the meanings that existed in the embodied performance (18). Before recent technologies, the conveyance of meaning in dance has relied on mutual physical presence during the process of transmission, whether in performance or in teaching. But motion-capture uses movement itself as the medium of documenting dance. Under the best of circumstances, it can produce kinesthetic sensations. Does it also convey meaning? Can dance movement be removed from specific human performers and still retain some of its meaning? Or perhaps my wording shows my humanistic bias. Maybe the real question virtual dance raises is: Can movement have value and meaning that to us beyond the limitations of human dancers? How much of the meaning we derive from dance comes from the humans, and how much might inhere within abstract qualities of movement (direction, shape, speed, complexity, etc.)? Technology is going to force us to decide.

For some, though, such as Merce Cunningham, the whole issue of humanity and meaning may be a red herring. When asked if he had any thoughts about how viewers should derive meaning from virtual dancing, Cunningham replied:

No. But I think it's something you look at and you have to figure out a way [to] receive it. And I think the most simple way is to look direct, not think it's something else than what you see...And then if you can make something else out of that, then that's all right...One could say, "Well, they're not human," or "they're




not this or that," but I have no sense about that. I'm sure that when the typewriter came in everybody said it wasn't human, and then of course you use it and it becomes human.

Biped and the Journey Beyond the Human Encounter #3 Biped Five dancers move forward from the darkness, side-by-side in matching diagonal lunges. Their arms are open, beyond wide, each exposed chest offering passionate proof that movement wants no story, no reference, just a willingness, a commitment, to full and unbounded presence. Wrapped in Gavin Bryars's lush drone, the dancers couple and part and shift and withdraw. Two remain and strike up a conversation of limbs and bends as strips of material on the sides of their costumes reflect an eerie blue bar of projected light. Another dancer, this one born of silicon, not flesh, appears to be standing and shifting upstage left, an illusion of perspective that evaporates quickly as it moves and grows (four times too tall), and then fades from sight.

Far from being some kind of antihumanist, Paul Kaiser makes it clear both in word (see the accompanying interview) and in deed (note the human-like figures and the performative style of his collaborations) that, even though his pieces exist in a digital medium, he is very attached to the movement of humans. Motion-capture technology has been crucial to his desire to somehow use the idiosyncratic details in the movements of dancers (and, in future projects, of untrained children and pedestrians) as the very signifiers of their human identities in a world without obvious cultural markers (19). The humanity of the work exists not in the figures, but in the re-presentation of movements only humans could create and realize. By removing the distraction of the human personality, we might be able to focus more clearly on the magic of the movement. But he and Eshkar are also clearly willing to push their re-presentation of those identities to very abstract ends, and in their projections for Cunningham's new piece Biped, they add a number of new figures to their pick-up company of virtual dancers.

While their previous pieces were only a few minutes in length, in Biped Kaiser and Eshkar faced the challenge of developing twenty-eight minutes of projections that would coexist with live dancers at various times within a forty-five-minute work. In addition to the hand-drawn figures familiar from their other pieces, they chose to include a number of movers based on the sensor dots of the motion-capture process (remember that the computer initially sees the sensors as moving dots, ignoring the human they are attached to). These dot-figures, seen from a variety of angles, seem like a new kind of humanoid skeleton, an electronic glyph indicating bodiless points of articulation. When projected as if seen from directly overhead, locomoting figures appear more like arachnids than humans; the sensors on their heads become tiny, centered bodies, and their limbs become four spider-thin legs slashing and reaching into the space. In another manifestation, a perfectly vertical line of dots begins to undulate side to side, revealing the limbs of a moving dot-dancer. After a brief solo, the figure simply seems to turn sideways, disappearing again into verticality. This effect was an eerie exaggeration of the very verticality that is part and parcel of the Cunningham style.

As Biped progresses, the viewer encounters an assortment of moving shapes and figures from the human to the abstract, and from tiny points of light to looming twenty- foot figures that seem to step over the heads of the live dancers. In the large proscenium of the State Theater where Biped received its New York premiere, the surprising effect of these projections (visible because they strike a two-dimensional scrim) was to enhance the three-dimensionality of the stage space and also to bring Cunningham's movement off the stage floor and into the air.

But the essence of Biped was the superposition of virtual dancers and live dancers in the same performance space. It is at the intersection between the two that Biped produces both new visual experiences and new meanings. Of the visual experi-




ences, Cunningham had this to say:

Oh, I liked it very much...I think the way the figures changed on our scrim, with those very large figures that moved as though they were like weather, I thought those were quite marvelous to look at...I liked the figures a little more than the abstract shapes, but with both things, I thought there were moments where the movement of one thing against the movement in the back-say, the movement of an object or a shape moving at a different kind of time than the dancing-was a kind of doubling of the possibility of how you see and what you see.

But juxtaposing a corps of virtual beings against the live dancers of the Cunningham company also begged the following question: Who are they, and what is their relationship to their creators and to me as viewer? Or, in other words, do these moving figures only convey meaning through the quality of their moving, or can we also derive meaning from their condition as virtual beings?

Bill T. Jones and the Metaphysics of the Virtual When a piece is danced by something no longer human, the critical issues reach far beyond whether we will accept their movement as dancing, because the virtual figures have a very complex relationship to their fleshy progenitors: a phenomenon which is particularly evident in Ghostcatching. Ghostcatching begins with a single figure who, over the course of the piece, "spawns" (the word the collaborators used during the creation of the work) a number of alter egos. Picture a person with multiple personali- ties, except that when a new one emerges it literally leaps out from the body of the original. Identified early in the collaborative process, these spawns were representations of emergent tendencies in the dancing of Bill T. Jones, each a kind of qualitative strange attractor within the maelstrom of his improvisations. And yet, when we see two or three or more of these spawns together on the screen, we know that each, in some way, "is" (is derived from) Bill T. Jones. In more traditional group choreography, and even in Hand-drawn Spaces, the choreographer might create all of the movement for all of the roles, but it happens in rehearsal through a process of negotiation: person-to-person; body-to-body. In Ghostcatching that negotiation, that testing of what is possible in the fulfillment of a choreographic vision, occurs person-to-machine between the collaborators and the digital brood motion-captured from Jones.

Early in its process Ghostcatching had another twist. Although it did not happen for the final version, there was an early intention to use Jones's captured movement as a kind of motion alphabet, and then develop software that would allow the computer to combine the elements of that alphabet on its own, based on algorithmic and other processes (20). Jones had this to say about the dynamics of self and spawn in Ghostcatching:

These virtual creatures, dancers if you will, are spawns of mine. They are not me. The word "spawn" was a very useful way for me to understand my role in this, in the sense that I am the primary source of the movement...This is a world that is almost like another dimension wherein Bill T. Jones has been, somehow or other, beamed in and has caused something to germinate there and grow...Where is this world? How do they inhabit it? And what are they like?...What are the values that we are giving to them? What will be [their] morality? What will be [their] poetics?...These creatures will interact with each other and they will choreograph themselves. They will move like their great-great ancestor, Bill T. Jones, but they will not look like him. And he, in some ways, is not even important at that point.




The computer is not the only technology that generates virtual dancing beings. Video (or film), while capturing the images of real humans, fixes those images at a specific point in space/time. These fixed images each become a kind of doppelginger which doesn't change or age or die (21). This technology can be used to remember those not present, even to summon them back from the dead. Bill T. Jones has used this technique in Still/Here, where video offers a voice and a site of resistance for the termi- nally ill, and in his solo Untitled, where Jones dances amid the video presence of deceased partner Arnie Zane. Asked about his technological conjuring, Jones replied:

I feel as if I'm ricocheting back and forth. A moment ago I said that [the virtual dancer in Ghostcatching] is a valid creature. But is that Amie Zane that you see [in Untitled]? You see some artifact of Amie: brief, poetic, enough to give you the taste, the flavor. Having danced with him, touched him, known him, I say "no, that's not him." That's the best we can do. And maybe it's the respectful thing to do, that we don't try to create a golem or to resuscitate the loved one...Now, having made that little spiel, maybe some day, with the technology much more advanced than we know it now, there will be an entity that looks, tastes, and feels like [the original].

Identity, never an easy issue, has become even more elusive in the age of the computer. Through incremental advances and media overexposure we have become inured to the magic act performed by technology. But the artistic exploration of the interface between the moving body and technological representations of embodiment can help to recover our lost awareness. To dance onstage with yourself, or to have your movements perform without you, can work to foreground the sleight-of-hand instead of gloss it over. Such art can also function as the means by which we more fully compre- hend the relationship between people and their mediated images, but only if we are both willing and able to look beneath the surface.

Where That Leaves Us I do not think that I am overstating when I say that we are standing at the edge of one of those moments when dance, both as a constructed medium of artistic practices and as an expressed reflection of the broader culture, is radically redefining itself. When I stop to contemplate it, the images of two conflicting dances seem to coexist in my mind. In the first, a dancer stands, frozen at this moment in time, and any movement that comes next will somehow be perfect, reflecting everything that we are and producing everything we will become. In the second, a dancer rushes forward, careening headlong in an un- known direction, with only two choreographic rules that apply: there is no stopping, and there is no turning back.

Whether we are artists, critics, or scholars of dance, it is important to emphasize the perfection in the duet we have all begun with technology. No one else will bring our unique somatic values to the discourse over the role of technology in our future, nor more clearly sense the bodily cost our culture might be paying for the power to create and control our reality. But to keep from feeling lost in our own momentum, we must open our eyes and keep asking questions. Bill T. Jones asks these:

It seems that when we start on these very tangible discussions about technology, I always end up here at this metaphysical place. That's what makes me think there's something very healthy about this whole virtual dance thing. It's confronting us with what we really believe about the transcendent properties of our art form, and what gives it validity...What is "good" choreography, on any level, and what qualities does it have to have to really keep those values that we prize so highly in live performance? That question is even heightened by virtual dance...There's




something about movement-in time, in space-that must succeed on its own, without the help of the human personality and human performers. And there we go back to the drawing board. What is a gesture? What is space when there is no space? And how does it make us care? That's the big one, isn't it? How do we care about dance in the virtual world?

At least for me, how we will care about dance in the virtual world is intimately tied to whether we, as a culture, will continue to value the human body and human movement as a conduit for our expression in an age that has been dubbed "post-human." Technology can either enhance or obscure the "humanity" of movement, but technology is becoming too much a part of every aspect of our lives now (how we travel, how we communicate, even how we procreate) to be legitimately ignored in some kind of purist zeal. If our dance is to reflect our lives, we must learn to create new movements in new spaces, and dance with the technology within and around us.

Notes

1. Production credits for these pieces are as follows: Hand-drawn Spaces, SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater, Orlando, Florida, July 20, 1998; Choreography-Merce Cunningham; Digital designs-Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar; Sound design-Ron Kuivila; Software design-Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut of Unreal Pictures; In- stallation and projection design-Marco Steinberg; Motion-captured dancers- Jeannie Steele and Jared Phillips. Ghostcatching, Houghton Gallery, The Coo- per Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, New York, January 4, 1999; Choreography, movement and voice- Bill T. Jones; Visual and sound design-Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar; Ad- ditional design and motion correction- Susan Amkraut and Michael Girard. Biped, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, California, April 23, 1999; Choreography-Merce Cunningham; Projections and visual decor- Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar; Music com- position-Gavin Bryars; Software design- Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut of Un- real Pictures; Live dancers-the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; Motion-captured dancers-Jeannie Steele, Robert Swinston, and Jared Phillips. Lighting design-Aaron Copp; Costume design- Suzanne Gallo; Projection-Jack Young.

2. A few dance/tech artists have written about this new work, producing articles and manifestos and how-to instructions and links to online performances, attempting to share their efforts and stimulate discourse. But

these writings are often only found in technology-dependent sources such as online magazines or postings on listservs, logical places to reach the growing membership of a techno-savvy subculture, but not yet on the radar screen for many dance scholars.

3. I use the passive "are moved" because, at least in the works I am familiar with, Kaiser and Eshkar make, or collaborate with others on, all of the decisions about how and when movement occurs and what the viewer will see of it-not unlike most Western film, theater, or concert dance.

4. When "virtual" dances are primarily accessible via the internet they can also be called "web dance," but the accuracy and/ or acceptance of these terms is still being hotly debated by the creators and viewers of such works.

5. At the 1999 International Dance and Technology conference the term "screen- dance" was proposed to encompass dance work involving computers, film, or video because all are experienced on some kind of screen: television, computer monitor, or projection.

6. All quotations from Bill T. Jones are taken from a personal interview I conducted with him at Aaron Davis Hall in New York on July 15, 1999.

7. Archives for the discussion topics from this listserv are available on the Dance and




Technology Zone website: http:// www.art.net/~dtz/index.html.

8. I would like to credit dance scholar Ann Dils for seeing motion-capture as an identification technology.

9. These questions clearly already apply to film and video documentations of dances.

10. The manipulation of light and dark, of color and shape and motion, is the essence of video and film and computer graphics, and the experience of them is time-dependent as in dance. Space is a primary differ- entiating factor since, at least at present, screen-based media are seen in two-dimensional formats. Three-dimensionality can only be represented.

11. The affiliations are as follows: at Ohio State, the dance department shares some personnel and resources with ACCAD (the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design); at Arizona State, the dance department is associated with ISA (the Institute for Studies in the Arts); and at Wisconsin-Madi- son, the dance program plays a role in IATECH (the Interarts and Technology Pro- gram).

12. All quotations from Merce Cunningham are taken from a personal interview I conducted with him in New York City on Octo- ber 12, 1999.

13. Note the masculinist hunter/killer refer- ences already built into the lexicon of technology. You "capture" the motion. You "shoot" the film or video.

14. In painting and sculpture, the human artistic activity is transferred into other media. In music, the human performative process is focused through a variety of instru- ments. Singing and theater, like dance, re- side in the body, but in recent centuries have become textually separable from it.

tural imperative) to pull us out of our own somatic experience, toward seeing aspects of the dancing as separate from ourselves.

16. Take blue-screen video as an example. By shooting a dancer in front of a consistent blue background, an editor can use an effect called "chroma-keying" to then place that figure against any background desired, thus spatially re-contexting the dance.

17. To keep from going too far back, I am intentionally overlooking the symbolic representation of natural objects (art) which, like writing, existed beyond the boundaries of the originator, and probably also facilitated the development of written language.

18. I suspect that it is possible that some experts can experience a degree of kines- thesia from reading a notated score, but I think there are severe limits on such experiences.

19. Clearly, to choose to create such beings marks them as the offspring of a very specific kind of artist within a technologically privileged culture, but the figures do not have any outward signs of race or sex or sociocultural status.

20. Algorithms are predetermined step-by- step procedures used by computers to ac- complish complex tasks.

21. There is a sense that when we have "captured" a dance through technology we have saved it for all time. Technological documents do age and die, but they do so differ- ently than humans. Or perhaps not so dif- ferently because they tend to die in two ways: the image deteriorates over time until it no longer satisfactorily recalls the original; or the media break down suddenly from mis- use or accident.

15. In many ways, mirrors were the first imaging technology (as opposed to a cul-




dance and technology: a pas de deux for post-humans

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