chris ziegler / movingimages

Another Journey in Time: rhythm and eye movements

In the summer of 2000, during a research lab at Arizona State University's Institute for Studies in the Arts, I gave a presentation of the Improvisation Technologies CD-ROM. Participating in the lab was Indian choreographer Jayachandran Palazhy who was establishing a movement research center in Bangalore called Attakkalari: centre for movement arts, where he hoped to initiate projects involving dance and new media technologies. Soon after, in 2001, Palazhy and I collaborated on my first stage work scanned, and we continued to work together on an interactive multimedia dance documentation project titled NAGARIKA: an Integrated Information System on Indian Physical Traditions.

The aim of the Nagarika project, now established as part of the Attakkalari media activities related to dance documentation, is to develop a series of DVD-ROMs based on traditional Indian dance techniques. The first of these series, inspired by both Improvisation Technologies CD-ROM and That's Kyogen DVD-ROM, received support from the Daniel Langlois Foundation (for digital archiving projects), the Goethe Institute and a Japanese art foundation. With this, Palazhy formed a small interactive media design and development team to work on the project including Matsuo Kunihiko, a Japanese media artist, and myself.

The first in the Nagarika series, Volume One, was dedicated to the traditional Bharatanatyam dance. As with the Kyogen project, I needed to research Bharatanatyam -- its traditions as a performing art and how it was transmitted from teacher to student. Indian dance training has a strongly oral dimension to it, and it was decided that the core of Nagarika should be lessons given by several teachers; some of the teachers are over sixty years old and Palazhy was at one time their students. On the DVD-ROM, six teachers give introductions into movement, time, rhythm and music; this involves detailed explanations and performance excerpts by the teacher themselves or by one of their students.

One could say that William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt had established its own modest oral tradition as manifest in the collection of short lectures on the Improvisation Technologies CD-ROM. And the interface designed for the Nagarika Bharatanatyam DVD-ROM was not much different from the basic layout of the Forsythe CD-ROM. Lectures (explanation) are linked to excerpts of movement sequences (Adavu) or longer parts of choreography (Korvai). There is an additional context chapter, to give space for longer explanations, that branches out to other fields related to movement, time and space. [see Figs. 11, 12 and 13] This is where the similarity with Improvisation Technologies ends. [Insert Two Figures: "Nagarika" Screen Shot. Context. and "Nagarika" Screen Shot. Korvai choreography.]

As mentioned earlier, the Bharatanatyam training is already very verbal; but there is also a high density of expressive communication involving the face, eyes and head movement and many other expressive gestures with the rest of the body. Originally, we were discussing the possibility of adding graphics to the video as with the Improvisation Technologies lectures. For example, the dance establishes space and time by a simple eye movement (as in looking from left to right) followed by an arm movement. We thought at first to emphasis some of these clear ideas by layering animated graphics on top. But Palazhy explained that the most important base of Indian traditional dance lies in the rhythm. And this rhythm, in traditional Indian dance, lies in between singing and body movement and involves different time scales. Therefore, it is necessary to 'sing' the beats, and to support the singing, the teachers use hand and finger clapping in numerous ways to help them recall very complex temporal structures that they have memorized. This makes metric counting almost impossible.

Still exploring the idea of adding graphics, we thought of depicting the different times scales by having watches running with the different arms; but this addition of graphic information offered no improvement on the video of the teacher explaining and demonstrating. So in the end we decided to simply leave the teaching alone -- as closely as possible representing a live teaching situation. The lessons, even on the video, are highly multi-dimensionally expressive as well as clear and precise. The dancers use the movement of the body to establish time and with expressive gestures establish the space -- the stage in front of the eyes of the audience -- through a joyful mix of talking, moving and singing. In Improvisation Technologies we used graphics on top of video lectures as a tool to follow the construction of an increasingly complex mental architecture through dance. Nagarika has no such specific development pathway; it is more a collection of stations along a journey in space-time.


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