“Inanimate objects have a very clear interaction with forces, a living body like ours can complicate this relationship endlessly.” Thomas Hauert

 

We are now a few weeks into the process of working with our second artist collaborator, Thomas Hauert who was in residence at ACCAD in September along with dancers Sara Ludi and Samantha van Wissen. Hauert is the director of ZOO, a contemporary dance company that performs improvised works motivated by Hauert’s “desire to maximize the creative possibilities of the body in motion and to go beyond the habits inscribed in it…”

 

Rather than emphasizing set choreography, ZOO’s performances privilege the emergent structures and events that evolve in the moment of collective and individual impulse and invention. This kind of work involves rigorous, long-term practice and cultivation of the mind/body connection and patterns of decision-making, perception, and action. Hauert has worked for more than a decade to hone this craft and develop training methodologies with his company for their own creative purposes but also for students of dance and embodied education.

 

As a creative research group, we at ACCAD are interested in the research methodologies and processes that Hauert employs and we are zooming in specifically to his body-level techniques and small group movement strategies. Our work now is to further analyze, catalog, and clarify the set of strategies we are focusing on in Hauert’s work using the video and motion capture data we gathered during ZOO’s first residency.

Thomas Hauert and Sara Ludi of Zoo Company performing an improvised "Resistance" duet.

We are also reaching out to our colleagues in the cognitive sciences to look for interesting research synergies and beginning to hone the terminology and descriptions of particular methodologies in collaboration with Hauert and his dancers.

 

In the coming weeks we will continue to delve into this set of processes for movement generation and into the working process of Hauert and his company so that we can eventually share this through our own inventions in the realm of computer graphics visualization. Stay tuned!

-Norah