1.1    Emio Greco | PC work and research projects

Since 1995 Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten have worked together in search for new dance forms. For both artists the search for a new dramaturgy of the body is an important motivating factor. The body is a holistic entity that can express itself through movement. From there choreography can start appearing and is being developed. Always interested in findings Greco and Scholten have engaged themselves in the creation of discourse, salons, publications and research around dance transmission, notation and recreation.In 2005, dance company Emio Greco | PC (EG | PC) Amsterdam, initiated and developed  interdisciplinary research projects that looked at the notation, documentation and re-creation of dance. The first period of research between 2005-2008 focused on the research question

What do we need to do in our attempts, to capture?

We looked at different documentation methods: notation systems, motion capture, film, text and multimodal interaction through interactive environments. The focus was on transmitting movement intentionality in physical preparation, “Double Skin/Double Mind” (DS/DM). The preparation workshop DS/DM lead to a publication “(Capturing) Intention” containing a film documentary, interactive DVD-ROM and finally these publications lead to the development of an interactive prototype installation for dance learning.
An environment to guide the moving body while learning was designed. The DS/DM installation invited a user, dancer and non – dancers to follow excerpts of the EG | PC’s dance preparation workshop. After the first 45mins of video instructions, the user is able to customize the learning sections. Finally the installation starts a practice session. The algorithms of the installation are looking at movement qualities, while the user is improvising, generating a physical dialogue of a dancer with an animated graphic object on screen. The installation is a reproduction of the real dancers workshop DS/DM, but also enables customized physical training and a performance try-out, where the software starts a creative dialogue, based on the movement qualities, the participant just learned.


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