The Wii Choir Would Be Fun, Really. . .
Posted: April 28, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dance, Max/MSP Jitter, Movement Choirs, Wii Leave a comment »To continue my thoughts about the appropriateness of reconstructing movement choirs using Wii as an interface, I will compare and contrast the two.
Movement choirs and Wii are designed to be experiential and performative. The amateur dancers of movement choirs were performing a communal identity that gave them back what they lost through the industrial revolution; their communities, “nature” and their physicality. Gamers using the Wii perform imagined identities of coordination, control and extreme athleticism. Both of these ways of performing provide the participants with coping systems in times of drastic cultural shifts (to industrialization in the case of the choir, and towards cyborgism and the digital revolution for Wii users. Both Wii and movement choirs provide expressions of physicality in disembodied modern culture.
The two differ in their relationship to the idea of the group, and to the compliance or defiance of the mainstream status quo. Movement choirs were designed to enact a lost pre-modern community, and could not be performed without the perfect cooperation of the entire group. Wii, on the other hand is designed to be consumed by an individual without regard for other actual people. Community, in the world of Wii, reduced to visual data with which the individual user interacts. Movement choirs were activist pieces through which participants demonstrated and advocated for a rooted, communal life. Though for a time they were adopted by the Nazis, who loved a spectacle, in the end the Nazi party and Laban and his ideas could not get along; movement choirs were neither about the industrial mass, nor the fascist mass. The average Wii use is apolitical and the actual movements of a Wii user playing a Nintendo-made game are passively. Unpacking these movements by examining their source, we see that a Wii user is performing movements designed for her by the corporation who took her money to sell her the experience. This relationship of tool to marketplace to performance is what makes technological artifacts so interesting to hack into, and to make things with.
Winter 2009
Posted: March 16, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: A-Scale, collaboration, dance, group notation, improvisation technologies, joshua penrose, knust, laban dance notation, Laban Movement Analysis, Max/MSP Jitter, Monster Partitur, Movement Choirs, physical practice, Richard Maxfield, score, Space Harmony, Titan, Vivaldiana, Wii Leave a comment »Working backwards, here’s what I’ve been doing the last few months.
- Meditative tracing of skeleton sculptures for William Forsythe’s Monster Partitur in the Wexner Center Performance space.
Photo: Lindsey Caddle Lapointe
- Afferent Data, an eight-channel sound environment responsive to the small movements of respiration, with Joshua (mentioned by Bill Mayr in the Dispatch). And therefore asking. . .
Photo: Ryan Agnew
- What is it to be alive? What is it that makes me alive? Is it possible to be still? What is the smallest amount of movement? What is the essence of being alive?
- Studying Vicki Blaine’s 1978 Progression dance score with regard to Rudolf Laban’s theories of space, and thus;
- Committing Laban’s A-Scale to muscle memory
as well as. . .
- Rolling, swinging, rocking and dropping my way through some Bartenieff fundamentals.
- Gathering information on John Rodriguez’ abstract ballet Vivaldiana, reading the Labanotation score, and embodying it. This has felt like a satisfying, complex physical Sudoku. Learning that every personal story is interesting if one spends enough time with it.
- Twenty-one beautiful sessions of playful, intentional improvisation (and four ballet classes) with Nik Haffner and friends in a workshop presenting William Forsythe’s ideas at OSU’s Department of Dance.
- Batsheva, Batsheva, Batsheva at the Wex. That’s watching them, dreaming about them, and talking about them.
- Learning the differences between Labanotation in 1927 and now.
- Attempting without much success to understand the score of a movement choir from Germany in 1927. Staring with fascination at pages of Knust’s Group Notation.
- Attempting, again without success, to map data from movement into Max/MSP through the Wii remote. The idea is to make an instrument which will classify movement according to the space and effort qualities of Laban Movement Analysis.
- Reading the fantastically illuminating responses of elective students in dance to a dance concert, and thus;
- revisiting the question; what do we make things for, our audience, our research, or somewhere in between? Facing that I have not really been asking this question with honesty. Appreciating the ideas of Richard Maxfield in his Composers, Performance and Publication essay in light of all this.
Johnny Lee’s Wii Smartboard
Posted: December 20, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Johnny Lee, Wii Leave a comment »Johnny Lee has used the Wiimote to make a cheaper, better smartboard. Check it out here.
Movement Choirs and Wii
Posted: December 10, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: accad, hacking, Movement Choirs, Reconstruction, Wii 1 Comment »I’m hoping to reconstruct a Laban movement choir from the Labanotation Score, but I envision a serious problem with finding sixty or eighty people interested this. in embodying a group that moves as one, yet has complex interrelationships. To examine what was happening in those movement choirs, it would be best to recreate on some level the communities out of which the choruses evolved.
How on earth could I drum up eighty or more amateur movers interested in this, and willing to learn to read basic Labanotation? I could bribe college students with free pizza, but that certainly wouldn’t help to flesh out the ideologically instructive, expressive nature the choirs had for their eager participants.
I’m theorizing that dance choirs were the mass expression of the 1930′s German zeitgeist, with its emphasis on healthy-body, life-reform culture–and that our mass bodily expression for today could be found in the rabid individualism of the Wii.
Rabid Individualists
I was at the Columbus Arts festival this summer when I saw a demo of the Wii, with eight stations arranged arranged around two central pillars. The full body movements were striking in the context of a crowd, but most eye-catching was the awareness of the movers; It was completely different than someone dancing in public, in that the awareness was on the relationship between their proprioception and the feedback they were getting from the interface.
Viewed as a mover of masses of bodies, the Wii, like movement choirs or Socialist dance fests, begins to look by turns diabolical and inspiring. The bodies are in their individual spaces, but with a little imagination I can envision the people using Wii right now as a matrix made up of bodies not fully aware of the ways in which they’re being used. In light of a critical view of mediated culture it is appropriate to examine the values and aesthetics at the source of the movement generated by a Wii.
I’d like to reconstruct Laban’s Titan virtually using multiple movers on Wii interfaces. I’ve got some hacking to learn. . .
