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Reviews

IDAT99:
The Yellow Brick Road

Dance and technology: gimmicks, realities, and possibilities. A conference in Arizona considers the future.

by Sali Ann and Alan M. Kriegsman
copyright © 1999 by Sali Ann and Alan M. Kriegsnam
Summer 1999

The International Conference on Dance and Technology (IDAT 99), held on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe in February and hosted jointly by ASU’s College of Fine Arts, Dance Department and the Institute for Studies in the Arts, drew some 200 participants from five continents, 15 countries and 28 U.S. states, among them choreographers, teachers, critics, scholars, dance technologists, librarians, administrators and journalists. The attendees roamed the expansive campus grounds, dropping in and out of darkened spaces to observe new research in progress. The Institute for Studies in the Arts in particular has fashioned itself within the university as a technology cocoon for artists and others to collaborate on new media explorations.

The Luddite in us felt a bit gleeful when we learned that the very first event at the opening cocktail party had had to be scrapped because the “electronic tutu” which was to have arrived from Germany had been lost in transit. There were other glitches in the circuitry throughout the conference, but FUBARs are now so expected they no longer cause consternation. A zen-like acceptance fell over the courtyard guests like a passing cloud. These were but tiny reminders that technology, after all, cannot solve all problems. Not even its own.

The conference had its ups and downs; many of the discussions were provocative, informed, useful. The opportunity to focus on philosophical and aesthetic issues in the interstices of new media, technology and dance often proved valuable. But, for the most part, the artistic work that issued from experimental labs was clumsy, bland or obscure—and at times either an uncomfortable fit or blithely unaware of precedents, thereby naively reinventing wheels. This is not to say that investigation of these new dance “platforms” isn’t important. It is vitally important. It’s simply that for now we seem to be better at dance than at technology. The promise of technology to serve dance and to embrace dance values is much greater than its current capacity to leap beyond the seductive lure of playing with new techie tools.

One needed teleportation to get to all the sessions—the handsome campus is so spread out. And of course there was far more going on than any single one of us could take in. Still, there were ample opportunities to see a diverse range of work—from Maya Deren’s now classic filmdance “Meshes of the Afternoon” with Talley Beatty, to Bill T. Jones’s Untitled (made for the now-defunct “Alive from Off-Center” PBS series), to Merce Cunningham’s latest collaborations with Riverbed, and the Institute-sponsored Ralph Lemon/Philip Mallory Jones/ John Mitchell CD-ROM interactive performance piece, where the viewer sitting at a computer can choose the sequence and direction of the “narrative.”

The allure of costuming the body with sensors and other digitally or electronically sensitive tools was featured in work by Canadian, German and American choreographers (Isabelle Choinere, Die Audio Gruppe, Troika Ranch), much of it irritatingly repetitive and of scant dance interest. Seth Riskin’s hour-long light show played with elements that have been more beguilingly explored by Michael Moschen sans technology—unless one sees the magic and art of juggling as a form of technology.

Ellen Bromberg, working with videographer Doug Rosenberg, John Mitchell and others at ASU’s Intelligent Stage, achieved a measure of success in establishing dance and dance movement as the core in a dream environment.

Thecla Schiphorst, who was among the team that developed the dance-synthesizing software LifeForms and has worked with Merce Cunningham for the past seven years, showed a video of a “virtual installation” in which audience members touch a velvet-like fabric stretched over a virtual body, stimulating movement and sensory involvement. “The skin as organ” she says of it. A caress or stroke of the fabric activates the technology, which produces a kinetic response. “Museums tell you not to touch. This lets you.” She uses technology in the service of exploring “corporeality”—a term that kept coming up during the proceedings. The work provoked divergent responses: One artist said he felt like a perpetrator, a rapist; another said she appreciated its tenderness—a quality often lacking in technology. Schiphorst said she wanted to explore issues of power and vulnerability, eroticism and violence, touch and our relationship to being touched and to touching. Of course we were seeing a video of the installation, not interacting with the thing itself. Once removed. Technology mediated by technology.

Yacov Sharir, who has been exploring dance and technology for ten years, moderated a session on spirituality. Participants seemed more fascinated with technology than with matters of the spirit, and what was meant by spirituality was left undiscussed. Sharir seemed most forthright in saying that he was still so consumed with getting his own experiment technically produced that he was left with “zero” thought for content. “How can virtual dance benefit physical dance?,” he asked. “Dancers feel threatened by it, and, when technology is a substitution for dancers it is threatening.” Nevertheless, Sharir sees an expansion of possibility with technology.

Impressive progress—and tangible results—were most apparent in the realm of notation and access to archival materials. Libraries, universities and other learning and business centers have had long and thorough grounding in using high-end computers that have been out of reach of artists. A workshop “From Dance Notation to Animation and Back—Making Movement Come Alive in the New Millennium”, involving Ilene Fox, Dance Notation Bureau, Tom Calvert, from Simon Fraser University, and Scott Sutherland, a dance technologist who developed the LabanWriter (Labanotation-editing software) with Lucy Venable at Ohio State University, demonstrated the computer transference from dance notation to an animated visual record of a dance and back again, a relatively new and still evolving technique of immense practical potential. Elizabeth Lyon at UK’s University of Surrey illustrated how digital libraries of dances are being used for teaching and research, and being rendered user-friendly in the process.

Although Merce Cunningham was not in attendance, his still ongoing, fearless and informed exploration of new media frontiers hovered over the gathering like an inspiriting angel, encouraging the computer-age generation to grasp the keys to dance’s future that remain, for the moment at least, locked in our imaginations.

Roger Copeland lectured on Cunningham’s successive explorations: his earliest, to separate sound and image, music and dance; from there to chance operations, and thence to film and videodances; most recently he has been working with the computer as a compositional tool, both for dance and scenic elements, and with such novel techniques as “motion capture,” in which moving bodies festooned with electronic sensors generate computer imagery facilitating the analysis and creative manipulation of dance movement. Cunningham’s quest and its byways, Copeland indicated, had been inevitable given Merce’s approach to the art. He added, parenthetically, that it would have been difficult to imagine Martha Graham working with such technologies.

The dilemmas and potentialities of dance and technology were encapsulated in the first day’s panel, “Dance and the Camera.” Deirdre Towers sees a new and positive explosion in dance video sophistication, though she pointed to what she called “the paucity of dancing in dance videos” and wondered “does the tiny box make the dancer shrink?” Yet she professed that “the dream state combines beautifully with dance—this is something you can’t do with live performance.” In the past, she said, dance videos often had no climax or center, and she wondered whether it was becoming a static form like a painting.

Douglas Rosenberg offered a radical manifesto, with an historical prologue, based on discussions that he, Sally Banes and Noel Carroll have been having at the University of Wisconsin. He offered Carroll’s term, “screen dance” as being the connective tissue between cine-video and digital dance. He spoke of wanting to create “an inclusive canon” as we “hurtle digitally into the millennium....One of the promises of technology, is the liberation of the body from its corporeal shell.”

Here, with his permission, are some salty excerpts from his “manifesto for screen dance”:

“We sit in a ghetto which privileges form over content, tools over practice, a modernist construct in a post modern era. Engaging sophisticated tools to make crude marks, more often than not less compelling than a child’s finger-painting. We congratulate ourselves on each new successful interface, without stopping to formulate new theory or to contextualize the interface in regard to contemporary culture. We speak in a elite privileged code about RAM and Megaherz and often dismiss valid criticism with the excuse that in order to understand the work, one must be versed in the technospeak that accompanies it. Or worse, we pass off the failure of a piece by blaming the malfunctioning technology. Or even worse still, we do not critique the work at all and buoy the maker’s spirits by congratulating him/her on a great new success. We are caught up in the allure of technology, in the utter sexual seduction of it, much like a fish is entranced by a shiny spinning lure and bites down hard permanently attaching himself to the object of his desire.

“Let us be honest, it has, much of it, been done before more simply and with other, perhaps less sophisticated tools. Old models, new tools. There is nothing radical about that.... Where is the critical discourse? Who will stand up and say about a work, this is a fraud, or this is simply a tired reworking of an old idea? Who will say that this work is less than the sum of its parts? Who will say that this work is part of an historical continuum which has not been recognized or artfully acknowledged by the Dance and Technology Community? I will say it here and now. ...It is time to create a forum for critical evaluation of the landscape of dance and technology that ... asks, ‘what is the social significance of this work and what is its contribution to the culture?’ The dance and technology pendulum has swung dangerously away from the art of dance and toward technocracy. This is a call for balance.

“It is time to begin to inscribe a canon that is inclusive of all that is screen dance and furthermore it is time for a re-integration of form and content and time to put an end to the cognitive dissonance that surrounds technologically mediated art work and obfuscates its failure to communicate on a plane which is relevant and meaningful. It is time for a recorporealization of dance and technology, time to reinscribe the body on the corpus of technology.”

There were two keynote addresses: the first by Bob Bejan, an executive with Microsoft and a former dancer; the second by Lowry Burgess, an environmental artist associated with Carnegie Mellon and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Bejan entertained and delighted even those most hard-core anti-Gates among us. He said that he was astonished by the work he had seen at the conference and wondered why the dance field wasn’t more visible in its efforts (of course the reason for this is that no one has as yet been able to create a mutually beneficial “interface” between dance and corporate America.) But clearly, he went on, artists have a great deal to offer the information technology field. He views technology as “a palette for creation.”

But he cautioned artists to not get caught up in the latest and fastest inventions. “Mastering what you want to do and say first is primary.” And he asserted that “dance people are more qualified in new media than others. The live performance moment is what interactive media is all about.” He explained this by saying that from the moment you click on AOL to the moment it says “You’ve got mail,” you believe you are in control, you suspend disbelief.

Now most of what he sees is the artist enslaved to the technology. “There’s no great rush to get there. It’s technology’s job to make itself transparent.” (Tell that to Sali Ann’s Thinkpad.) “You can go a long way using a little bit of technology and you aren’t missing anything.” Now he was singing her tune (She’s still using Windows 3.1). “The industry survives on FUD (“fear, uncertainty and doubt”) and we’re (the computer experts) the ‘get-its’. You aren’t missing anything. But now is the time to collaborate.” He quoted Moore’s law: memory will double and cost will be cut in half.

Burgess, on the other hand, wool-gathered in time-honored sixties fashion, leaving many of us in the dust. There were glints of provocative thinking, murky though the environment was. “Science is and has its own art and its own science and, most secretly, its own religion, its own language and value structure. And art has its own art, its own internal culture. These two big cultures are trying to talk to each other. “

He referred back to technos (the digital revolution), ecos (cosmos as one living interrelated whole) and mythos (the quest for meaningful existence). Now we see explosions/flashes of meaning from strange places. We are in a “new reality.” And “what is the choreography of this new reality?... We are pulling away from the earth in order to reattach to it in a new way.”

All the way through his talk, we wished Elizabeth Streb or Trisha Brown or Bill T. Jones had given us their take on “the new reality.” The conference seemed to be more about technology and dance than about dance and technology.

Earlier we confessed to having an abundance of Luddite genes; we can’t help it. You see we grew up in the radio (is there a more imaginative medium?), movie and tv age, not the computer age. And we absorbed the possibilities of dance/media through images of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, the Nicholas Brothers, The Red Shoes, and, yes, Michael Jackson. One of the most successful documentations of dance we saw recently was a black and white film, made in a single day decades ago, of Andy deGroat spinning and talking about it. And a two-minute snippet of Galina Ulanova in Romeo and Juliet, caught during our nocturnal channel surfing. The camera, the technology, was a means to an end, not the thing itself.

So, increasingly as frustration mounted with the performance aspect of the conference (gimmickry, research, and negligible dance), we and the other critics participating in a penultimate panel were approached by dancers and others who whispered conspiratorially, “we can’t wait to hear what you have to say about this stuff,” with the implicit hope that we squash it like an ant making towards our picnic basket. We didn’t do that. But Sali Ann said she didn’t find it especially interesting to write about process. She questioned valuing process as be all-end all nowadays, and elevating it to a higher plane than finished work. She was quickly rebuffed by some audience members and colleagues on the panel who reminded her that the Judson was work in process, that so much of what has developed in dance in the past several decades has been about process, that process is something in and of itself worth observing, and that product has been increasingly under the critical lens in universities.

And perhaps this goes back to something Susan Aron pointed out: Technology offers something flowing and changing; it opens up the environment. Art was constructed to hold things together.

Speaking of holding things together, and flow and change, there was notably little cultural, ethnic and racial diversity among conference attendees and presenters, and among the work that was shown—even in the historical screenings, sparse examples of important work made by “minority” artists.

Andrea Woods, former dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company, presented “Blues Wimmin,” a media-lecture-performance, using text, slides and performance, based on the recently acknowledged contributions of African-American women blues artists and the story of the Delta Flood. She explored “putting the body into the history,” in a format designed for young people. Asked in the discussion that followed how she felt to be one of the few minority people represented in the conference, she retorted that she was more concerned at the lack of repre-sentation of the work of black artists in the screenings—once again, she said, we are left out of the history.

Who has access to exploring new technologies, who is to be included in “the new inclusive canon of screendance” are among the most important questions yet to be addressed by this and other gatherings.

As if to reassert the irrefutable primacy of the art of dance, the last evening of performances included a solo by Sean Curran using the simplest black and white projections like film titles, filmic references but no apparent technology as partner or tool. Confessing later in the artists’ panel “I don’t own a computer,” he spoke of the influences of Chaplin and Keaton, and how inspired he was by their poignancy, irony, pathos and humor. His own performance was received with an audible sigh of relief and gratitude from an audience benumbed by continuous days of technological wizardry.

The obfuscating possibilities of technology are compounded by the language that is being adopted by dance academicians and technologists alike–what one colleague suggested guaranteed credentials at “Lewis Carroll University.” Some samples: recorporealize, embodied and disembodied spaces, multi-mediated, fetishizing the aesthetic, objecthood, performative, choreutic, instantiation, reification, electronic scarification.

Everyone laughed when Mike (i.e., Alan M.) suggested at the critic’s panel that the field could benefit from a “radical jargonectomy.” As one sage put it, “we are swimming in primordial soup.” Still, it’s clear that the future holds an ever-expanding place for the marriage of technology and dance, and that the advantages to be gained—in creative activity, in documentation and preservation practices and archival uses and access–are vast. The best efforts of the past (which are plentiful) convince us that dance and technology can and must be mutually enhancing partners, and that as both fields march forward, it is imperative that each hews to its highest ideals and seeks the same level in its sister enterprise.