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"Nature and Form - Codes and Origins" |
THE DANCING BODY AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Brigitte Heilmann
The technological advances of recent years have changed our world and have had consequences on every conceivable field of our lives, including the arts. New Media is leading to new systems of representation in art. This development has been most significant in the fine arts where the technological revolution has led to a new movement with its own style, called 'media arts'. Screens, videos and virtual environments have found their own place and legitimacy as medium next to the traditional artistic means of expression.
With the performing arts it's another thing. The medium here is the human body. The theatre situation is commonly defined by the fact that there are flesh-and-blood actors or dancers in front of a flesh-and-blood audience.
It's the presence of the body that gives the performing arts their communicative force and insistence. Until now it is not very often that we see dancing or acting computers or cyborgs on stage (there are some exceptions; one of which I will refer to later). So, the relationship between performing arts and New Media is always a relationship between body and new technologies.
When talking about dance and new technologies one can't deny the fact that there are many dancers and choreographers who refuse to work with new technologies. They regard New Media as rivals to the human body on stage.
They also refer to the restrictions of mobility a Multi Media equipped dancer has to face while fighting with the usual spaghetti of cables on stage.
But the the main reason for the common resistance is very simple: In general neither the technical equipment nor the technical knowledge are available or affordable. Furthermore many choreographers refuse to work with software to design and record choreography or to use it as teaching tool. They argue that it takes too much time to learn the programs and that it is faster and easier to solve choreographic problems directly in the studio with the dancers.
You only have to look at the process of dancer's work: the movements created by the choreographer are transferred physically to the dancer. Despite evolving technologies this kinaesthetic process has not changed the work of most companies.
Aside from the group of choreographers and dancers characterised by their deep-rooted resistance to the use of computers there is another group who has been experimenting with the new technologies for years. Why do dancers or choreographers use these new technologies in their work at all? I would like to suggest some possible reasons.
What makes the dancing body so receptive to the New Media is its constitution at the end of the 20th century. The body itself appears as deconstructed, fragmented, dismembered; the idea of an unseperable identity finally belongs to the field of fairytales. The body seems to be a mirror to the world which lies in pieces. New Media provides the dancers/choreographers with tools to express this new image of the body.
Stroboscopic light for example show this physical ambiguity on stage. The Japanese company Dumb Type is using this form of lighting, which has long been an substantial equipment at techno clubs. The same effect may be reached by the technique of virtual reality, when dancers interact with their digitalised body within a virtual installation and experience a feeling of disembodiement.
A second explanation for the current fascination for new technologies may lie in the wish to add other dimensions to the performance situation on stage.
Everybody staging a choreography knows about the limitations he or she is confronted with: there are limitations of space (which is strictly defined by the stage area), and limitations of time - due to dance being located in the present.
By using external technical elements like film or video projections, screens or VR-elements there are new possibilties to connect the direct experience on stage with other more distant worlds. Films for example can show what's already happened. Or they can make expressions visible on a scale that's beyond the capabilites of the stage.
In his choreography 'Twice' Hans van Manen presents his dancers in long shot and close up at the same time: film sequences make the face expressions visible - this was already in 1970 .
New Media seem to be perfect tools to discover new areas of the body, to show different realities of the body.
Advanced technology in medicine has taken away all mystery from the body: there are fewer and fewer secrets left about it. Like research scientists, dancers and performers use their body more and more as pure material, as surface, as object. Even on stage the body has become a toy of technological experimentations. Having plumbed all the facilities of the external body with different dance styles from classical ballet to Contact Improvisation dance artists are now discovering their inner bodies. They reveal the bodies' usually imperceptible particularities on stage.
In her piece 'Stab' the Canadian choreographer and dancer Marie Chouinard made the inner sounds of the body audible wearing a microphone right next to her mouth.
The Australian performance artist Stelarc even made visible the inner structure of his guts: In the performance called 'Stomach piece' he swallowed a micro-camera illuminating the landscape of his stomach; the pictures of the camera were projected on big screens.
It seems as if dancers and choreographers want to catch up with reality outside the theatres by using New Media. They want to show complex, multidimensional worlds on stage and try to open up new areas of sensitivity for the performing body. And last but not least, they want to establish another form of perception using different perception levels.
I will give three examples to demonstrate in which different ways various artists deal with New Media.
Over the last decade William Forsythe with his company, the Frankfurt Ballet, has become one of the most important choreographers of today. Besides his new movement language and his way of dealing with time, space and music his approach to New Media has become one of his basic characteristics.
The CD-Rom Forsythe developed together with software engineers of the ZKM, the Centre for art and media technology in Karlsruhe, is currently on everyone's lips. This CD-Rom serves primarily as a training tool for the company's day-to-day work, helping the newly engaged dancers to find their way around Forsythe's movement cosmos by demonstrating key steps and figures.
On stage the new technologies play an important role as well. In his choreographies Forsythe often integrates film sequences. In 'Sleepers Guts' he showed a mixture of filmstrips by American video artist Bill Seaman and video material recorded live on stage focussed on various things on a table. In his last full evening ballet 'Eidos : Telos' words or sentences were played to the dancers by monitors which were controlled by music. The dancers were free to incorporate the given information into their improvisations. The software which was developed by Michael Saup who called it 'Binary Ballistic Ballet' doesn't squeeze the dancers into a technical corsett but supports them in the freedom of their movements.
Summing up, you can say that for Forsythe, New Media are tools for an aesthetic event consisting of many factors. It is always the dancing body that is at the center of Forsythe's choreographies and not computers. The computers are an addition and normally invisible for the audience. Using new technologies he shows the dancing body as part of a complex, a multimedia environment and by doing so he reflects in general the condition of the body today.
My second example refers to Robert Wechsler, choreographer of a small company called Palindrome Dance Company. He lives and works in Nuremberg. His approach to New Media is an example of using computers to create a direct relationship between body and environment.
Wechsler's aim is to create interactive pieces. Together with software engineers he has developed systems which allow the movement of the dancers or of the public to control, release and to modify stage-lighting, music and projections.
With the software 'TouchLines' one can draw lines on a video picture which are sensitive to tiny little changes. That is, if a dancer touches with any part of his or her body one of these onscreen lines, he/she may evoke changes in lighting.
Or the dancers wear electrodes on their body. The piece 'Electroden' allows the public to hear the electrical impulses generated by the muscle contractions of a dancer. As various muscles tense and relax a kind of body symphony is produced.In Wechslers work technology and dance technique are so intimately connected that it becomes difficult to distinguish them. The computer is seen as an element with equal rights on stage. Unlike Forsythe's sophisticated dealings with New Media, Wechsler allows the new technology to have an important and independent impact on the events on stage.
Californian artist Chico MacMurtrie goes even further. The stars on his stage are no more human beings but - robots. For ten years MacMurtie has been constructing his sculptures made of steel together with engineers and programmers. More than 70 robots have already been created, some of them look like animals, some like humans.
The movements of the robots during the performances are controlled by computers.
The sculpture 'Tumbling Man' is moved by a human counterpart, whose joints are connected to those of the robot by remote control. The 'Tumbling Man' imitates everything that his human partner does, from plié to somersault.
The 'Amorphic robot works' - this is how MacMurtrie calls his robot creations - explore the ultimate limits of using new technologies on stage and at the same time, they give us visions of a possible future where robots will be a common extension of our bodies.But we don't have to face a robotic society to know that today we have to redefine our bodies in a changing world. The consequences of new technologies for theatre, for dance, cannot yet be fully ascertained. The art of dance will not remain the same in the era of cybernetics, of television, of worldwide communication networks. Virtual technologies open up new experiences of space and dance's interaction within it.
Perhaps dance artists who are concerned with physiology and information flow, muscles and pixels, who are willing to combine flesh and blood with bits and bytes - perhaps these artists are the only ones who can provide us with some glimpses of our future - which may be to greater or lesser extent embodied.
ballett international / tanz aktuell -- Luetzowplatz 7 -- D - 10785 Berlin Tel. +49/30/254 49 520 -- Fax. +49/30/254 49 524 -- http://www.ballet-tanz.de
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