Human mechanics and soulful machines: Choreographic perspectives on human qualities in bodily movement

Summary

1 Introduction

The beginning of this thesis was the research question: How can digital technology be used in choreographic works and processes to capture human qualities in body movements? A series of choreographic processes has served as a laboratory for the project. With Don Ihde’s experimental postphenomenology as a theoretical starting point, I have used mechanics, robotics, neurophysiology and concepts like movement-image and body-image to change perspectives and shift between identities that capture different aspects and qualities of bodies and movement.

This research project may be described as a process where every choreographic work is a result, which at the same time serves as a source for finding new perspectives and aspects in the next work. Video sequences and documentation of the works can be found on the DVD inside the cover of the book. In chapters 2, 4, 5 and 7, the text is directly connected to specific video sequences on the DVD. The titles of the video sequences match the headings of the text sections. The video sequences are a part of the thesis, and I chose this format in order to make the choreographic parts as accessible as the written texts. Sketches, specialised computer programs, movement code and work diaries from the artistic processes also have served as source materials.

2 The soulful dancer

This chapter deals with some issues raised by artistic works, which have influenced the present dissertation. A number of such works are described, including choreographic works as well as works and performances using digital technology in various ways in connection with bodies and movement. The chapter begins with some general reflections about the qualities in living dancers that capture my interest as a choreographer. This is followed by a section about my programming of the industry robot that performs the work The Lamentations of Orpheus. Then, one of the voiceinteractive dance solos in the performance Patterns, Thought and Empty Space, and the performance Qivittoq, are described. In these solos captured data from the dancers’ movements and motions shaped the music and sounds. Imagining the body as a machine, and animating inanimate objects, is not new. Notions of human bodies, animals and machines being re-constructed and hybridised into new bodies have served as bases for mythical creatures in poetry, film and other artistic media. In a few examples, I describe how man throughout the ages has created, both in reality and in imagination, mythical hybrid creatures that have made the borderlines between human and non-human fuzzy.

3 Theoretical starting points and influences

The third chapter deals with the theoretical starting points for the project and begins
with a run-through of Don Ihde’s experimental postphenomenology – the theoretical
centre of gravity in the thesis. Experimental postphenomenology is a kind of
investigative research where experiments in both experience and thought are
important elements. It does not only investigate the object or phenomenon
perceived, but also directs its attention to how it is perceived. Ihde stresses the
importance of training oneself to “see phenomenologically” – that, during your
research practice, use a “gaze” that reflects its own observations. Examples and
experience are important elements, and in experimental postphenomenology learning
by doing is, as in many other kinds of research, a basic method.
Experimental postphenomenology does not take its starting point in a language and a
set of definitions that have been worked out in advance, like mathematics, logics and
certain theoretical sciences may do. The investigation begins with describing the
parts, and these descriptions must be conducted in a provisional language where
concepts still have not been given unambiguous definitions. In the next step, the
descriptions lead to reflections about the phenomenon and the limited perspectives
that the investigation has to be aware of. The importance of acknowledging
perspectivism has always been a phenomenological conviction – but that conviction
also places perspectives within a variational framework. This theory of variation is
the core of phenomenology and is still important in postphenomenology (Ihde, Postphenomenology, 7-8) The artistic driving force in this project concerns realizing intellectual experiments
and bodily movement fantasies. When something is not as it usually is, our
assumptions about what should be are made visible. Don Ihde shows how using
several theories and strategies enables us to find several possible ways to perceive
objects and phenomena. He switches between strategies based in the natural
sciences, instructing our way of seeing, and a hermeneutical guidance of our looking,
to show different ways of reading a two-dimensional schematic sketch as a depiction
of a three-dimensional object. Reducing a phenomenon and depicting it in a
schematic way is an interesting method for making visible how we perceive and
interpret what our earlier experiences tells us would be seen from another
perspective.

The chapter then moves on to a survey of other theoretical influences. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between abstract and concrete movements are discussed,
as well as Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics. Philosophical perspectives of
movement are drawn from Henri Bergson’s theory of memory, movement and
perception, Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of movement-image and time-image and the
literature researcher Martin Hägglund’s discussion of timeliness. The physiologists
Sten Grillner and Peter Wallén describe how our neural networks guide our
movements, and the neurobiologist Semir Zeki makes connections between visual art
and the brain. In Etienne-Jules Marey’s and Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotographic
studies of the movements of humans and animals, there are similarities
with Gunnar Johansson’s perception studies of our ability to recognise human
walking. The neurophysiologist Giaccomo Rizzolatti and the research philosopher
Corrado Sinigaglia describe how mirror neurons make it possible to understand
emotion and intention in the movements of humans and animals.
New technology opens possibilities to break the natural relations of sensomotor
integration by working with abstract relations and mentally constructed connections.
The body-image, movement-image and the attitude to these can shift and be varied
in different ways. While switching between recognising different aspects, human
movement appears as a multistable phenomenon. A consequence of this multiplicity
of possible approaches is a bodily concern, where I as choreographer can never reach
a definite approach. It is this concern that has driven the research project on through
the series of choreographic works and processes.

4 Navigation

In the choreographic work Navigation, no human being is dancing. The work can be
described as a choreographed exhibition where six sensory sculptures are touched
and influenced by their audience in different ways. At this exhibition, the visitor can
pull strings, touch balls, turn the crank of a ballerina, bend elastic balls and stir water
to make mechatronical bodies, immaterial 3D-creatures and recorded video dancers
come to life. Through the sensory interfaces the visitor can reach the bodies of the
sculptures and manipulate their movement and sound patterns. This physically
tangible influence was important and I wanted to shape the contact with the
sculptures to make it, in different ways, suggestive of the feeling of touching and
being touched by something living. Below are short descriptions of the six sculptures
in the exhibition.
Corpus aquarium
In Corpus aquarium, a dancer dressed in green glides or hovers in a Plexiglass box. On
the top of the box is a glowing blue ball. By rolling and turning this ball the audience
can find their way into the other rooms of the box – video fragments with loops of
other dancers in other colours and choreographic movement patterns. The
movements of the ball cracks the picture and the rubbing fingers make the body
parts float apart, turn upside down and change places with each other.

The Pearl Fishers

On the bottom of a vat of dark water you see the picture of a dancer dressed in gold.
When the visitor stirs the water, the dancer starts crawling and two voices sing an
electro-acoustic remix of the Pearl Fisher duet by Georges Bizet. The moving water
makes a singing head appear and disappear in the dark water while the dancer rises,
unfolds her arms, and turns into two and then four dancers, creating geometrical
patterns of bodies and dark spaces between them.

Je crois entendre…

The aria of this scrap conductor also comes from the opera The Pearl Fishers and is
performed by a little robot, built of metal and junk, who tries to collect its body parts
to conduct and dance to the singing of the tenor – here in a version where Carl
Unander-Scharin has remixed his own voice and placed it in an electro-acoustic
sound orchestra.

Petruchka´s Cry

This sculpture is a miniature version of the ballet Petruchka, which was originally
choreographed by Michail Folkin to Igor Stravinsky´s music for the Russian ballet in
Paris 1911. On a one meter high box in dark blue velvet are two mechanical dolls.
The pirouette of the ballerina is totally mechanical and directly connected to a crank
on the front of the box that the audience uses to propel the performance. The
gyrations of the ballerina also drive a wheel that sends pulse signals to the computer,
making it run Petruchka’s choreographed movements. While programming these
movements, I used the weight of the body parts to create the feeling of the
movements – as Petruchka is torn between hopeful love and resigned sadness in his
eternally repeated mechanical movements.

Choreographics

On the floor, there is a plate of stainless steel, filled with salt. The plate is circular and
about one meter in diameter. In the salt, three dancers in different colours move.
Around the plate are four meter-high pipes and on the top of every pipe is a blue,
bud-like ball. The balls are attached to the pipes with heavy springs, taken from the
hoods of scrapped cars. By bending and placing the balls in different ways the
audience can make the dancers change colours, change size, change velocity and
move in different directions.

A little blue pyramid

The voice harp is an instrument with nine playable strings – wires – stretching
between the floor and the ceiling. To play the instrument, the visitor walks up on the
base and in between the strings. There, inside the voice harp, the visitor can pull,
stretch, bend and play the strings with her or his entire body. On the wall, there is a
blue pyramid, slowly rotating in black space. The different tensions in the strings
shape the interplay of the voices in the dynamic sound-space where the visitor finds
himself. The strings also govern the shape, surface pattern and rotation of the
pyramid, as it moves towards and away from the voice harp player in swaying
rhythms.

5 Hybrid, Creatures and Labyrinths

The second choreographic project became the performance Hybrid, Creatures and
Labyrinths, which opened at Moderna Dansteatern in Stockholm in October, 2005.
The idea was to fill space and time with hybrids of human, machine and animal
bodies. Having previously worked with programming human-like movements for
robots, mechanical and virtual dancers, I now wanted to let human dancers use their
imagination to experiment with moving as if within another body and through
another kind of corporeality.

In this work, I wanted to challenge the ingrained system of movements that are
perceived as “natural”, and very consciously change the way of moving with an
abstract corporality as a starting point. During rehearsals, the dancers worked out
specific movement patterns for the eleven scenes. Their task could be to draw
specific geometric patterns in the air with body parts that had been given other
proportions and functions, or that certain body parts had borrowed qualities from
other kinds of bodies, like robots, rats, birds and so on. The dancers borrowed from
each other their movements and ways of moving, and at other times the labyrinth
pattern of the stage and imaginary notions of a different spatiality would influence
the shape of their movements.

6 Choreographic conceptions and perspectives

This chapter finds its starting point in the technologies used for capturing, directly or
indirectly, human qualities in the movements of dancing bodies. The chapter begins
with a description of digital technology designed to virtually create physically credible
movement with kinematics and the artificial bodily intelligence built into the inverted
kinematics of some of the programs. After this, the possibilities of optical Motioncapture
technology to capture and transfer human movement to virtual bodies are
discussed.
Later in the chapter, I describe how I have used robotics and mechatronics as
choreographic tools in my work. As a choreographer I move in a circle of shifting
perspectives and identities while switching between programming the movement,
watching it and feeling it in my own body. A section about conscious and
unconscious secondary movements and their importance for feeling and expression
follows. The chapter ends with a reflection on the use of choreographic realisation of
kinaesthetic fantasies as an overall artistic method, where I use perspectives and
concepts from different areas of knowledge to give machines “soul” and create
movement in collaboration with human dancers.

7 Four new compressed classics

As a consequence of the human qualities of movement highlighted in this research
project, I have, in a new series of choreographic works, more consciously designed
and chosen materials, technologies and choreographic methods that create emotionally
charged secondary movements; vibrating, quaking, swaying, pulsing, sighing and
gasping bodies, as well as voices whose intensity may be changed by the audience or
by electronic means. These works are still in an exploratory phase, hence they are not
analysed in depth in the thesis. Below follows a description of the four works. Video
excerpts from the first two works can be found in chapter 7 of the DVD.
Argument in Burden´d Air
Argument in Burden´d Air is a choreography machine charged with body, movement
and poetry. This interactive choreographic work is directly created for the DVD in
this thesis. On the screen, a blue-clad dancer repeats the same movement, over and
over again, in a loop. By moving the cursor on the screen the interactor, like a VJ and
DJ, can create rhythmic loops from the dancer’s movements and the voice reading
Blake’s poem. When the cursor moves continuously from left to right the original
choreography and text is performed.

Ombra mai fù

This singing sensory tree consists of copper pipes that have been twisted and
soldered together to form a trunk. The audience’s movements around the tree makes
its underground voice sing fragments from the Handel aria Ombra mai fù, where
Xerxes sings about his love for this tree and enjoys its shadow. If anybody moves in
the shadow the voice will sing the entire aria, and the closer the audience comes, the
more intense the voice, the music, the light and the wind that makes the leaves
vibrate become.

Fuga XVIII a 4 voci, in G#-moll

In this installation, four “lizards” with bodies consisting of text move up the wall in a
four-part fugue. Word by word, the lizards throw their sentences out on the wall,
which is gradually filled with text, as long as the audience keeps the work in motion
by tapping Morse code on the four signal keys that are the interface of the exhibition.

Olympia

Olympia is a mechatronic coloratura soprano equipped with a virtual voice and a
virtuosity of movement. Her body consists of rusty machine parts, governed like a
giant marionette by 16 motors connected to a computer in the ceiling. Apart from
the guidance of the program code, Olympia’s dance is also governed by gravity and
by the secondary movements that appear when her body swings along and the
movements die away after quick pulls on her wires.

To create “Olympia” was a much more complicated task than I could predict, when
we started to plan the project. The process was also much larger than in my earlier
mechatronical dance works. Perhaps this was a stroke of luck, because if we had
known about and been able to predict all the problems, it might have been hard to
keep up the necessary enthusiasm for the idea.

The fact that, each time we have found a solution to a difficult issue in the
construction process, I feel that we have resolved the hardest problem, makes it
possible for me to work on until every part is working and the whole artefact can
start to live its own life. The first image of the work and the process always turns out
to be a radical simplification of reality. In the realisation phase, a great amount of
unpredictable tasks and decisions arise. The unawareness of future difficulties is the
very nurture that gives me the energy to start a new choreographic research.