Digital Technology in
Choreography: Issues and Implications
by Sarah Rubidge (Ph.D)
Published in the Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium
of the Dance Society of Korea, Seoul, Korea, November 6th 2002Introduction
In this paper I will be examining some of the issues which arise from
the use of digital technology in dance. These range from discussing the
nature of the contributions digital media is making to dance to some more
philosophical concerns which are raised through its use in choreography.
As Prof. Yang Sook Cho (2000) has shown digital technology incorporates
a number of different types of media, each of which can contribute to
choreography in different ways. Digital technologies can be used for a
variety of purposes such as facilitating the production of notated dance
scores (Labanwriter and Calaban), or the documentation of dance works
using video, photography and textual commentary , as well as notation
(DanceCodes). These however are not my concern in this paper. Rather my
concern lies with forms of digital technology, such as digital animation,
the motion capture systems which provides the data from which many such
animations are increasingly being generated, digital audio, digital video,
interactive media, telematic media, which are used to enhance or supplement
the content of choreographic works. These technologies are relatively
recent introductions to the choreographer’s palette. I will not
be exploring the implications of all of these in the context of choreography,
as Cho’s paper discusses them in some detail.
Digital Technology as Medium or Tool.
In a choreographic context, digital technology for its own sake is not
of great artistic interest. It is in essence a sophisticated tool which
enables the enhancement of the choreographer’s art. As with any
tool, whether it be a choreographic device, a dance technique, a lighting
design, digital technology itself can be used in a multitude of different
ways, according to artistic intentions. Its contribution to the work is
as limited or as expansive as the artists’ imagination (and of course
skill in manipulating the digital technology). The self-same digital technologies
are used by choreographers, video artists, installation artists, visual
artists to produce works with a very different look and feel. In dance
pieces may use motion capture and animation technology to generate digital
representations of the human body, with which the performance environment
is then peopled. However, these animated figures may have textures not
generally associated with computer animation technology, as in Merce Cunningham’s
Biped (1999), a collaboration with digital artists Shelly Eshkar
and Paul Kaiser of the New York based company Riverbed. However, other
artists may draw on more conventional renderings of the raw animation
data, as does Yacov Sharir of University of Texas. Or artists may use
the data from motion capture to generate fluid non-representational or
abstract designs, as in Merce Cunningham’s newest work Fluid
Canvas (2002), also a collaboration with Riverbed.
It is apparent from these examples that the aesthetic contribution made
by the animation software is not intrinsic to the software itself, rather
it is generated by the artistic ideas which are driving the choreographer
and/or collaborating visual artist for that particular work. Because of
this choreographers from the world of classical ballet, from mainstream
modern dance or from ‘post-modern’ dance could all develop
work using the same digital technologies, yet still make works which remain
within their own artistic and stylistic preferences. Similarly, interactive
technologies and telematic technologies can be used to generate dances
in a multitude of dance styles, for these systems are a merely a very
sophisticated means of structuring choreographic events in real-time.
The art of the digital dance work, it is important to emphasise, lies
with the artist and the use they make of the technologies, rather than
in the technologies themselves. As such digital technology is a merely
a servant to the choreographer’s artistic vision.
However, some technologies are more than tools. Indeed some may be more
akin to a medium than a tool. In the 1980s the medium of video allowed
the development of a new genre of choreographic practice, which developed
its own conventions and opened to door to new ways of thinking about choreography.
So too might certain forms of digital technology provide a framework for
choreography which opens up new modes of practice, and new ways of thinking
in and through dance. Amongst these are those forms of digital media which
allow for real-time interactivity . These may prove to be a new medium
, not merely a new tool, for choreography. This is indicated by the fact
that some features of this digital medium raise interesting philosophical
questions which have the potential to extend and enhance our understanding
of what constitutes the choreographic art.
Interactive Digital Media
Interactive digital media are, in many ways, simply very sophisticated
structuring systems which allows artists to engineer the integration and
layering of multiple strands of the dance medium in real-time. It allows
an interactor to change the form, content and quality of the artwork as
they engage with it and, in the dance world, has given rise to the development
of new modes of dance performance in which the performers generate and
modulate the setting in which they perform. It has also given rise to
a new mode of dance event, the ‘choreographic’, or ‘performative’
installation (of which more later). Additionally, it has brought into
sharp focus questions concerning the nature of authorship. If the performer,
or indeed ‘audience’ is empowered to change the environment
in which they perform, in what sense can the originating artist/s be said
to be the ‘author’ of the work? Because interactive technologies
require us to ask such questions, I would suggest that they not only extend
the possibilities available to the dance artist, both in terms of form
and content, but also open up the possibility of using choreography to
interrogate complex philosophical issues.
But first a brief explanation of what an interactive environment is. An
interactive CDRom, such as that I am using at the moment, is a simple
version of a screen based interactive environment. Here buttons or hotspots
are activated when the mouse passes over them or clicks on them and trigger
an event, which might be a change of image, or the display of new text
or sound. They can be used for the most simple of purposes, as I am doing
now, or can be used to generate an art work in its own right (e.g. Windowsninetyeight
(1998) by Igloo). More complex versions of screen-based interactive environments
are found in computer games such as Myst, or Doom. Here a complex network
of rules which respond to user responses are built into a game system,
and generate ever changing behaviours on the screen. These highly sophisticated
systems could very well be adapted for use in choreographic works.
There are, however, other types of interactive environment which go beyond
the screen. These are more complex that the simplistic click and go technologies
of the CDRom, though not yet as complex as the game systems mentioned
above. These interactive environments extend the world of digital media
from the screen and have been designed by artist-programmers specifically
with embodied or spatial interactivity in mind. Some systems comprise
forms of wearable technology (Troika Ranch’s MIDIdancer, for example,
and the system developed for Cho’s recent interactive work Survival
Game [2000]) . These allow the performer to generate imagery directly
from the movement of their limbs and torso. Electronically sensitised
spaces, such as The Intelligent Stage, Isadora (Troika Ranch) or those
designed by companies such as Palindrome Dance Company , extend this potential
into general space. Here the installation or performance environment itself
is sensitised by invisible electronic triggers and processing devices
which are embedded in the ‘empty’ space which lies between
the boundaries of the physical environment. They are activated by the
motion of a body, or several bodies, as they move in and through the space.
By virtue of this performers, and in an open installation the viewer,
can control the presence and absence of the imagery in the performance
environment or installation, and modulate its qualities in real-time.
The electronic triggers and processing devices comprise part of in a complex
network of interactive possibilities which are programmed to respond in
certain ways to certain types of movement. A simple example might see
a slow gesture moving in a clockwise direction generating one kind of
sound event, and a similar gesture in an anticlockwise direction producing
another kind of sound event. Or a travelling movement towards one area
of the space might increase or decrease the volume of a sound, or change
its pitch, or make a video image fade, or move towards you, or retreat
from you, or change colour, whilst another would create a different series
of effects. Or the generation and modulation of sound might be generated
by relationships between people in the space. Two or more performers moving
close together, for example, might cause the sound to change, or the lighting
to fade, or a series of images appear in the space.
Such environments clearly allow performers and/or audience to modulate
the environment in which they perform in real-time. In this way they are
able to generate mood, to create the musical score, to conjure up and
dance with a virtual cast of dancers, or to change the physical characteristics
of the world they are inhabiting (from city to country in a second for
instance by changing the projected video environment). For the first time
the performer/s have the power to control the way a work is seen and experienced
in all its dimensions. They become responsible for altering the ambience
and content of their performance environment and ultimately for controlling
the aesthetic shape of the work-event . This introduces a significant
change in the role of the performer, whose responsibility prior to this
in a performance context has always been to provide the movement strand
of a dance work only.
Interactive technologies and Choreography
However, interesting though this might be, the capacity to change the
environment in which one performs, although novel, does not necessarily
constitute a major shift in choreographic practice if the performers’
movements are strictly choreographed according to a predetermined choreographic
structure. Interactive digital media only begins to make a significant
contribution to choreography as an art when its underlying principles
are taken on board, and become central to the choreographing thinking
which underpins any work using interactive media. . Some of those principles
are explored below.
An interactive, or responsive, environment is by nature improvisatory.
It is non-linear in structure, and can produce several different work-events
from a single compositional framework, or system. Each interactive environment
is designed by the artist-programmer to create a means through which multiple
strands of digital imagery can be articulated. As such it serves as a
structuring system through which the multiple strands of work-events can
be generated spontaneously in real-time.
Interactive art works are composed of two distinctive parts, each of which
is designed by the artists involved in the making of the work . It is
probably easier to think of this type of work as having both a visible
and an invisible component. The visible component of an interactive dance
environment generally comprises a combination of video imagery, digitally
generated animations, ‘VR” environments, and electronically
generated sound which are either played through a computer screen or projected
onto the environment in which the work is mounted, and of course the movement
material and relationships generated by the interacting performers. The
video imagery will inevitably include movement images, whether these be
representational or abstract, and the sound is generally spatialised,
that is it travels from one part of the performance environment to another.
The invisible component of an interactive environment is of central importance
to its intentional logic. It constitutes a complex non-linear system of
electronic triggers and computerised instructions for processing the sounds
and images which are generated by the triggers The system is designed
and built on a computer, using a programming language of some kind .,
and then mapped on to real space . This ‘invisible’ environment
drives the work, determining a variety of factors concerning its presentation,
including the kind of electronic manipulations which are to take place
during the event. As such it is an intrinsic part of the work’s
content and is an important part of the intentional logic of the work.
The interactive system is an open-ended system. Because its network of
triggers and rules for responses are non-linear in form, at any point
in the process of generating a work-event in an interactive environment
a choice as to what to do or see or experience next is available to the
performer or viewer. Indeed, in many ways the interactive digital system
resembles the rules for a structured improvisation. The system constitutes,
if you like, an electronically generated improvisational framework. The
digital imagery which comprises the fluid environment in which the interactor
moves is brought to presence, and in some instances its qualities modulated
in real-time, when the electronic triggers and processes are activated
by the performers/viewers. Each of these strands of imagery (sound, image,
text) is regulated by an individual set of rules for action which is embedded
in the computer programme, and which initiates the display of the imagery,
and the form of electronic processing which takes place as it is presented.
These rules are complex and are frequently devised by the designer of
the interactive environment, generally in collaboration with the choreographer.
In a very real sense they constitute part of the underlying choreographic
system or structure. That structure is not however the closed structure
of the conventional dance event, but an open-ended structure in which
the imagery can appear in any order, and be imbued with a multitude of
qualities, according to the decisions of the interactors. As individual
systems of imagery intersect when the interactive environment is activated
by a viewer or performer, they generate a fluid, interplay of the strands
of imagery which make up the dance event.
I noted earlier that the activity of the performers constitutes but one
strand of the imagery which is integral to the interactive art work. It
is not, however, necessarily the most important element of the piece,
as it might be in a more conventional dance performance. Ideally, in an
interactive digital dance work the shifting, modulating digital images
which are generated by the performer become an integral part of the choreographic
structure, part of the choreographic content, not merely a setting against
which movement takes place. Indeed, some of the images the performer manipulates
might even be representations of dancers, and thus become a ‘virtual’
cast. In this case the ‘setting’ or environment ceases to
be a background in which the dance takes place, but instead operates as
a second, even third, layer of performance imagery, an extra cast of virtual
dancers if you like, with which the performers can interact. Similarly,
when the performers modify the mood and expressive form by changing the
qualities of the musical environment, or the direction of the motion of
video images, or the dominant colour of the imagery within which they
move in real-time, they are generating part of the choreographic whole,
not merely a background to the dance.
Now, if the performance system which guides the behaviour of the interactive
environment constitutes a structured improvisation, the interweaving of
the strands of imagery, both real and virtual, will always be different.
The performers will thus generate different expressive emphases from one
work-event to another, and reveal different facets of the work. If they
have a fixed choreographic form to follow, any differences will be minor,
and a stable dance artefact will result. Thus the use of interactive media
does not necessarily extend the possibilities available to the choreographic
art. However, the use of an performance improvisation system in an interactive
space, because it is itself a form of interactive system (i.e. it is a
set of rules for making choices with respect to the behaviours and relationships
within in one strand of the dance medium ,) exploits the particularities
of interactive digital media more fully than a fixed dance work, and does
extend the possibilities available to the choreographer. Now whilst this
does not invalidate the controlled use of interactive systems in performance,
it does allow the choreographer embrace the intentional logic of interactive
art, which is in part concerned with problematising the role of the author.
And it is here that one of the more interesting issues which is raised
through the use of technology in dance lies.
Implications of Interactivity in Choreography
The implications of the full use of interactive technologies to the role
of the choreographer are legion. Interactive art, which Roy Ascott (1988)
and Landow (1994) amongst others suggest is the art of the new century,
reconfigures the relationship between artist and their performers and
in the case of interactive installation art between artist and public.
Instead of the artist producing invariable forms and structures which
the viewer or listener must absorb, but in which they cannot intervene,
and the performer can only provide with a layer of expressive intent,
the interactive artist produces an environment for performer or viewer/listener
to explore and compose as they carve their own path through the environment.
Any interactive work is, in conventional terms, unfinished at the moment
it is placed in the public domain. Indeed in conventional terms it is
never finished, for each work-event differs significantly one from the
other as a result of differences in response to, and from, the environment.
The work as work is thus less a finished artefact than a collection of
materials and a framework within which they can be organised into a multiplicity
of temporary material forms. In making an interactive work, for the originating
artist, the artistic process is truncated at a point which is, in a conventional
work, considered to be sited somewhere in the middle of the compositional
process. From that point on the composition of the work lies in the hands
of the interactor.
Thus the artist, instead of producing a work upon which the viewer’s,
or performers’ imagination can play, produces materials and designs
a flexible network through which to link those materials. From this the
viewer or performer is given the opportunity to actualise their imaginative
vision in material form, rather than merely experience it in a virtual
form in their mind. In an interactive work, then the viewer, listener,
performer is invited to navigate their way through the network of elements,
producing them combining them in different ways, discarding them, and
in so doing form up an artistic world uniquely their own. Thus the performer
or viewer takes over the authoring process at a certain point, and becomes
a co-author of the work. This is something of a departure in the arts.
Although the performer has been given certain freedoms within improvisational
forms of performance since the 1960s, the viewer has rarely been given
those freedoms, the originating artist consistently maintaining his or
her control of the form of the work that the viewer sees, or hears.
Philosophical Issues for Interactive Art
This departure reflects the changes in philosophy which have been taking
place over the last five decades or so. Now developments in art do not
take place in a vacuum. The philosophical frameworks which guide our thinking
have a significant impact on the way art is understood and practised.
During the last five decades Western philosophy has undergone a radical
period of questioning which has reconfigured the way we understand the
world, and our roles within it. This has seen parallels in certain of
the more avant garde practices in the arts. In the 1960s and 70s for example,
improvisation, Happenings, and other modes of performance practice which
allowed for spontaneous interventions from both performers and audience
became an accepted modes of performance practice in the USA and the UK.
The artists who formed the collectives such as the Judson Dance Theatre
in New York began to collaborate not only with their performers but also
their audiences in the performance event, and to produce work which gave
the performers, and sometimes the audience, the freedom to actively affect
the progress of the work through time, and even to generate the materials
from which the work was made. These artists were challenging not only
the dominant modernist dance aesthetic, which saw the author exert full
control over the form, movement content and movement quality of the work,
but also the philosophical framework which underpinned it.
That philosophical framework was based in a mode of understanding the
world which has established a hold in the West since the eighteenth century.
This mode of understanding the world valorised objectivity. Its aim was
to validate what Western thinkers knew to be knowledge through scientific
experimentation and rational debate, to establish a true understanding
of the natural world, and of the moral framework and aesthetic judgements
which guided their behaviour and tastes. These last were embodied in ‘civilised’
society, represented by those sectors of the European social hierarchy
who had money, power and status. The attitudes of this class of people
served as the underlying premises upon which Western culture and thought
was built. The philosophical aim of thinkers in the eighteenth, nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was to establish the universality of the
social and cultural mores which underpinned their society, and of that
which for them counted as ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’.
The norms established by western society were thus considered to be universals,
givens, non-negotiable ‘facts’ of life.
In the mid to late 1960s, French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault (1972), Gilles Deleuze (known variously as ‘continental’,
or ‘post-structuralist’ philosophers), challenged that world-view,
proposing that knowledge, morality and aesthetic judgements were not givens,
were not universal, but were perspectival, and thus change from culture
to culture, within cultures, and even from individual to individual. In
doing so they destabilised not only the social but also the conceptual
underpinnings of the West’s previous understanding of the world.
A similar, although less radical questioning of the established world-view
was also taking place in the arts in the Anglo-American framework through
the work of Morris Weitz (1956), W Wimslatt and Monroe Beardsley (1962)
Joseph Margolis (1974) , and of sociologists such as Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann (1966). These thinkers, like their European counterparts,
began to concede that knowledge was perspectival and partial.
In the latter half of the twentieth century it became accepted by theorists
and philosophers (amongst them Roland Barthes (1966), Foucault (1969),
Jacques Derrida (1969a; 1969b) and Umberto Eco (1969), Margolis (1981;
1995) and Danto (1980) that concepts, and by extension works of art, are
‘open’. That is they do not have a single meaning or message,
but their meanings change according to the time and the culture in which
they are viewed ore experienced. The principles underlying this understanding
of meaning were that every individual has a different personal history
which is superimposed on shared cultural and social histories, which were,
even within a single culture, themselves multiple. It is this combination
of the intersubjective (shared understandings) and the subjective (personal
knowledges) that we bring to our understanding and interpretation of the
phenomena we encounter. This we bring our own reading to the world, but
ground that reading on shared understandings derived from our cultural
and social worlds.
Authorship and Interactive Art
In the world of the arts the result of these insights was a reconfiguration
of the notion that the work of art was an utterance which had a meaning
which mapped directly onto the intentions of the author, and that the
task of the performer or director was to convey that meaning as accurately
as possible, and of the viewer to reconstruct the authorial meaning as
they viewed the work. If they did not succeed in doing this then they
had misunderstood and/or misarticulated the work. Wimslatt and Beardsley
challenged this view in their seminal paper “The Intentional Fallacy’
as far aback as 1962 as did Weitz (1956), Eco (1969) and later Margolis
(1980) and Danto (1981), who all proposed that art works were ‘open’.
That is, they had no fixed meaning, rather their meaning changed from
one time to another and even from viewing to viewing .
This understanding of the artwork as multivocal rather than univocal underpinned
the artistic practices which had their genesis in the 1960s and 70s, and,
as we will see, has re-emerged with equal vigour in interactive art in
the 1990s. The new philosophies proposed a model of texts and works of
art, which took the network, or web, as its framework. This model, which
clearly parallels developments in science such as chaos and complexity
theory, and indeed in the underlying structure of digital technology,
allows the art work to be understood as a collection of elements which
are combined into a whole. The poststructuralists proposed that it was
not only the originating artist who ‘constructed’ the whole,
but also the viewer in the very act of viewing, or reading, or listening.
In spite of appearances, the material combination of the elements which
is devised by the artist is not fixed at the level of the ‘workness’
of the work (although it might be fixed in its physical form). Rather
that form is subject to perceptual reconfigurations by the viewers as
they impose a structure derived from their own interests on the ‘whole’,
placing some aspects of the work in the ‘foreground’, and
others in the ‘background’. Each viewer, it is proposed, does
this differently. The work of art is therefore more than an object, comprising
a fixed form or progression of events in time, rather it remains a fluid
collection of elements which are constantly being reconfigured in each
viewer’s perception.
The Choreographic Installation
Now you might be wondering what all this philosophy has to do with the
relationship between digital technologies and choreography. It is, I would
suggest fundamental to an understanding of some of the new works being
made by choreographers which use interactive digital technology. Indeed
I would go so far as to suggest that the interactive art work is an actualisation
of those philosophical positions, inasmuch as it
…reconceives conventional, long held assumptions
about authors and readers and the texts they write and read, embodies
Julia Kristeva’s notions of intertextuality, Mikhail Bahktins’
emphasis upon multivocality, Michel Foucault’s conception of networks
of power and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas of rhizomatic,
“nomad” thought (Landow 1994: p.1)
Interactive artworks are designed to not merely to accommodate the reconfiguration
of the components of a work in the performer’s or viewer’s
mind proposed by the philosophers, but to actualise that new configuration
in the real world. The performer and more importantly from a political
perspective the viewer, are empowered and become part of the process of
creating the physical work of art.
In interactive art this empowerment of the viewer and performer finds
voice in the immersive interactive installation. The immersive interactive
installation is perhaps the epitome of interactive arts practice. An interactive
art work which is designed and mounted in an open space, it is subject
to being formed and reformed by viewers’ presence and movement in
that space in real-time. Now immersive interactive installations have
been generated by visual and sound artists for some years now. However,
their works tend to be designed as a space for viewing or listening to
the images.. Although the interactor generates and organises the images,
it is predominantly so that they can observe or hear them as aesthetic
objects. They thus remain trapped in the role of audience member, albeit
a particularly active one.
More recently choreographers and theatre practitioners such as Blast Theory,
have begun to enter this field of practice. These artists have brought
with them the notion of the ‘performative’ to the installation
. The performative installation is that in which the interactivity itself
is aesthetically significant, and becomes part of the aesthetic object.
Such installations are “…clearly designed to give rise to
performances and explicitly account for the audience’s role within
[those] performances” (Saltz 1997: p119). When such installations
are generated by, or in collaboration with, choreographers they become
what might be called ‘choreographic’ installations.
These installations are generally immersive electronically sensitised
environments, triggered and activated through spatial or embodied interactivity.
The rules which drive them are frequently based on understandings of the
use of space derived from choreography. In such environments the viewer
becomes not merely a trigger for the environment, but an integral element
of it. Trajets (2000) an installation made with a large team
of artists in collaboration with choreographers Susan Kozel and Gretchen
Schiller is one such installation, as is Desert Rain (1999) by
Blast Theory, Halo (1998) an installation by Simon Biggs upon
which I collaborated, and Light Room (2002) by Company in Space.
These installations are designed to ensure that the interactors fully
inhabit the installation, and in doing so not only generate the installation,
but also become performers in it, and thus an integral part of a choreographic
work-event. These ‘open’, public installations, however, may
also become a site for a more formal improvised performance, which is
enacted by performers who have rehearsed in and with the system. Frequently
in these performances the more subtle ‘visible’ elements of
the installation are brought to presence in a more nuanced version of
the work than that generated by the novice interactor.
Authorship and Interactive Choreographic works.
The use of interactive media in choreography raises genuine questions
concerning the role of choreographer as author. For example, it is clear
that if interactive systems are used to their full potential, that is
as improvisatory systems open to performers or the general public, and
thus control of the formation of the work as event given over to the performers,
the author relinquishes control of the form his or her work takes, and
in doing so relinquishes his or her role as author. But does it follow
that this is that the case? I would suggest not. The choreographers of
even improvised interactive dance works, including choreographic installations,
do not relinquish their role as author, but remain firmly implicated in
the work. The degree to which this occurs, however, is dependant upon
the originating choreographers’ approach to the choreography. If
the choreographer chooses not to give the performers the opportunity to
improvise in real-time within the system then the role of choreographer
as author is unchanged from that of the conventional dance piece. The
choreographer here is ultimately in control of the behaviour of both the
performers and of the installation environment. If the choreographer sets
up a structured improvisation performance system allowing performers to
make certain choices but not others, and this is used as a further interactive
system within the interactive environment, then he or she is maintaining
a significant degree of control over the work, even though not total control
over the work-event. Nevertheless the performer is not authoring the work,
merely the work-event. The amount of freedom given to the performers is
determined by the choreographer, as is the type of freedom they are allowed.
However much advantage they take of the freedom given it is the choreographer
who devises and sets the parameters within the improvisation system, and
who consequently maintains a substantial role in the authorship not only
of the work but also of the work-event.
If, however, the choreographer allows performers to become familiar with
the rules underlying the installation, to ‘rehearse’ with
it, and devise their own choreographic response to the installation, they
relinquish much more of their authorial control. If the installation environment
is opened to the general public, in which case uninitiated viewers become
‘performers’, the choreographer relinquishes even greater
amount of authorial control. However, I would argue that even then the
originating artists remain inextricably implicated in the work. It is
the authors’ materials, their themes, their ideas, which provide
the frame within which the interactions take place, and which subtly guide
the responses of even the uninitiated interactors. This is the authored
work. The actualisation of that work by interactors, whether as viewer
or skilled performer, constitutes authorship of the work-event, not of
the work itself. The interactors are therefore not co-authors of the work,
but authors or co-authors of the individual work-events in which they
are participating. Issues such as these, which are inherently philosophical,
are implicit in the use of interactive digital media in the arts, and
form part of the challenge facing the choreographer who works in the domain
of the digital.
Conclusion
The last twenty years have made it clear that digital media has had a
considerable contribution to make to choreography as an art form, to choreographic
thinking, and to our understanding of the dialogue between artist, performer
and viewer. The use of digital imagery in a performance setting, whether
this be visual or sonic, generates a mobile world with which the performer
can engage, and thus extends the contexts in which dance performance can
take place. It allows live dancers to interact with virtual worlds, rather
than merely be represented through them. However, it has been argued here
that it is interactive technologies in particular which offer an innovative
new domain for the development of choreographic thinking. The advent of
sophisticated interactive technologies are now allowing the viewer and
performer to make a genuine contribution not only to the interpretation
of the work, but also to the authorship of digitised dance-events in the
moment of performance. This is leading choreographers, in collaboration
with interactive artists, towards a new mode of choreographic practice,
the ‘performative’ or ‘choreographic’ installation.
These installations increasingly challenge the role of the choreographer
as author, and indeed the notion of performance. Of perhaps even greater
importance, they are generating new ways of thinking choreographically,
and reconfiguring the roles of the choreographer, the performer and the
viewer.
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