_
All these difficulties let the program in the 80’s and the 90’s appear not as a suitable tool to choreograph and generate movement for stage performances. It was a tool to study movement for improvisation, experimenting on movement with digital animation tools, designing movement outside one’s own body.
For example, the software allowed to view a movement phrase in reverse to its original direction, it allowed to view its mirror image and to manipulate the speed in which it was generated.
At that stage in time it seemed an unrealistic request to ask the human body to imitate a program which still was a poor attempt to reproduce fully a dancers expression possibilities in movement.
The personal achievement of a choreographer (P. Ventura) by the program were still there. It helped to breakdown habits and patterns of movements due to the many years of choreographing practice and the natural tendencies to let other dancers move with the abilities of one´s own body. Due to the proportions of each individual body, the abilities and treatments, depending on whether one is left or right handed, movement habits are written into each body’s memory. Working with Life Forms made the choreographer self conscious of the possibilities and range of movements that were still unexplored in his own body.
While working on a new production in 1997 with Life Forms to choreograph, “Deus ex Machina”, Pablo Ventura was working with an animation that clumsily imitates human movement, producing an artificial quality of movement. One might describe the movement quality as slightly robotic or mechanic. This as such was quite interesting as a finding trying to achieve an artificial look which finally generated a entire new movement quality throughout the whole piece.
All in all, the computer as a choreographic assistant created a strange situation where dancers attempted to imitate the quality of movements of an animation tool that itself attempted to imitate natural and organic movements of dancers.
The Life Forms software had the potential to change choreographic work on stage in the same way the emergence of digital video had on dance film and documentation. Videos becoming part of the scenography as projections on stages, as an art form in itself through dance works created specifically for video (Video-Dance and Dance for Camera).
In the case of contemporary dance, one could imagine that the possibility of creating dance patterns using computer to autonomously work out movements through chance operations could become a reality. The use of chance and randomness was after all already a reality that choreographers were experimenting with. For example, Rudolph Von Laban had devised dance compositions which he described as an inner vision of form, whereby he makes use of an imaginary Icosahedron, a geometrical sphere surrounding a dancers body to establish spatial coordinates, towards which one directs and moves given joints or points of the body (Picture 2), a method further developed in the 90’s by William Forsythe’s “Improvisation Technologies” (Endnote 4). Choreographing with a set of coins or using the I-Ching Book of Changes to establish random patterns of movements through chance operations were extensively used by Merce Cunningham and John Cage choreography and musical compositions.
The choreographer P. Ventura envisioned that in a similar way, one could program a system of chance operations into a computer software to achieve movement possibilities and ways to construct autonomous dance phrases, which had been unimagined before. This lead to the idea of creating the Choreography Machine.
back - page 3 of 19 - more