Cellular Body (No Time To Fly)
At the 4th Choreographic Coding Lab (New York City, 2015),
the participants were provided with motion data and videos of No Time To Fly (2012),
choreographed by Deborah Hay and performed individually by
Jeanine Durning, Juliette Mapp and Ros Warby.
Deborah's choreography score consists of questions, which makes each dancer perform uniquely.
Extensive research has been done on each dancer's motion, particularly, the travel path
to understand their movement characteristics by Florian Jenett and others.
"My body is limited in what it can do so I'm not interested in what it can do. I'm interested in how I can raise the threshold of my attention and energy when I break it down to the cellular body. And it's the whole body at once. All that cellular body is contained, like in a silhouette, of the human body. (...) And it's the multi-cellular body I attend to when I'm dancing."
-- Deborah Hay lecture to score team February 2011
In response to Deborah's comments, I decided to build a real-life particle system
as a metaphor for a cellular body. Since visualization of the body movement
has been done already, I focused on interpretation of the choreography in a
different dimension, real-life particles. Particles are scattered by
SPIDAR-mouse, originally designed as a haptic device but modified to respond to
dancer's movement. Several kinds of material are tested:
flour, ground seeds, ice, sugar and black glass pieces, and I ended up
using glass on white paper and sugar on black paper with videos performed by
Jeanine Durning and Ros Warby, respectively.
As for implementation, the dancer's position provided by Motion Bank
is input to a Kalman filter to compute a smoothed velocity.
A force proportional to the velocity is applied to a pin by the haptic device
to scatter the particles. The position of the pin is not measured by the system
and is affected by the applied force, the size of the device and friction
between the pin and paper, which blurs the correlation between the performer
appears in the video and pin movement.
Thanks to the organizers of the Choregraphic Coding Lab, and special thanks to all the participants at CCL for giving me valuable comments.
Links
Github
Motion Bank
Documentary of CCL New York City by Motion Bank