Motion Bank: Two

Re-imagining Choreographic Ideas

Posts from the “Bebe Miller Company” Category

A Few Questions and Responses

Posted on November 27th, 2013

Meta Academy compilation of images

Meta Academy compilation of images

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of talking with Nik Haffner, Marlon Barrios-Solano and their students at the Inter-University for Dance Berlin (HZT Berlin) about our TWO project and the upcoming Motion Bank launch in Frankfurt. The students talked about the connection between dance and technology and asked how I came to work in this field of research. It reminded me how little I think of all this as “technology” and how much I orient around the human collaboration aspects of our work. It is the relationship between computing ideas and choreographic ideas that so defines my research in the last couple of decades. And it is the engagement between the culture of art and the culture of science that has become our true methodological space. Interdisciplinary work is intercultural work.

Here are a few more of the questions from the students and my responses:

 

What is the TWO project? Is it two different scores for two artists?
The TWO project is ONE digital score focusing on the thinking body and dancing mind (a phrase I am borrowing with permission from the illustrious David Gere and his Introduction to Taken by Surprise, an excellent compilation of articles on dance improvisation). So it is one project. One Score. Two artists. In some writing I did for the project I recently explained it like this:

Our work begins and ends with two dance companies. Unrelated to each other. One from the US (the Bebe Miller Company) and one from Europe (Thomas Hauert’s Zoo Company). Both are currently choreographing improvisation for performance. And both are engaging directly with the nature of human consciousness. When we watch the dancers, we are watching them at work. We are witness to the concentration and forms of attention that they bring to the moment. And we are witness to their habits, tendencies, attention, impulses, and memories in action. In this project, we have selected two working strategies each from the two companies to shed light on and bring us into a direct encounter with what the dancing mind and the thinking body. In an early storyboard for the project I called it The Dance of Attention but that was actually too limiting.

 

How were the artists for Motion Bank chosen?

For our part it was very intuitive really. We wanted to start from a different place then we had started with Synchronous Objects. We decided to start from a choreographic phenomenon and then look into the processes of two different artists to see what insights their ways of working might shed on that phenomenon. We were looking for people we could enjoy working with who also had a relationship to deep process and had some small-scale works (2 or 3 dancers). Bebe Miller was a natural fit because she was engaged in a duet project with her company and we knew a lot about her working methods. We found Thomas Hauert’s work through our friends at Germany’s hidden gem, the PACT Zollverein Center for Choreographic Research. PACT helped support our work by funding a residency for me and Thomas to exchange ideas and everything just unfolded from there. I immediately appreciated Thomas’ sense of processes that generate movement and his interest in the cognitive challenges that improvisation can involve.

 

Did you make everything you planned to make? Will you share the data so other things can be made from your resources?

Deadlines always mean something gets cut and that’s certainly the case with us. At some point you have to “put the show on the stage and turn on the lights.” We hope to add a few more animations and graphs in the coming months but what is online is a full representation of the project. We would love to share the data from this project and Synchronous Objects any time there is interest. Motion Bank is a kind of open source initiative. When Forsythe dreamed it up he really wanted it to act as a catalyst for other artists to explore digital scores and traces of choreographic thinking and to make tools that can be used by all kinds of artists for even more projects. I think the Piecemaker tool they created is super useful and the publishing system for the scores. And I hope the ideas are too.

 

Can you share more about the scores and ideas you selected from Bebe Miller and Thomas Hauert to discuss perception/cognition?

While the two dance companies we are focusing on are both interested in the forms of perception and consciousness accessed and enacted in improvisation, they explore those questions with very different strategies. We focus on four of those strategies in the sets you’ll see in Motion Bank at the launch on Thursday. The project is divided into four sets with the following titles: Habit, Tendency, Impulse, and Memory. I look forward to having it out in the world and knowing what ideas, questions, critiques, interests it brings.

—Norah

Screen shot from our Motion Bank project TWO that will be online November 28th

 

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Data, Duet, Habit, Impulse, Memory, Philosphy, Process, Technology, Tendency, Thomas Hauert Zoo Company, Uncategorized

Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Preview: Bebe Miller, Tendency Set

Posted on November 27th, 2013

“We are generating movement strategies that unfold in ways that are not as feasible in step-by-step choreography, for us. We specify the intentional body-mind-set and allow the movement articulation – the dancing – to respond to the frame or strategy.” —- Bebe Miller

 

 

The Motion Bank interface is set up in “Sets” that are devised by the creative teams working with the choreographers.  Motion Bank hopes that in the future, visitors to the site will be able to make their own preferred sets of related information. The four sets that we have curated for this premiere on Thursday November 28th focus on a handful of the mind/body strategies that these makers use in creating performance improvisation. For example, Bebe Miller has a longstanding interest in the movement tendencies of her dancers and how these can be distilled to create states for improvisation. In our TENDENCY set, we have several different windows into three states that Bebe has devised over the years, Risky Weight, Story State, and Drive State. States are the other side of HABIT and that is the focus one of Thomas Hauert’s sets.

 

“I find myself drawn to the pull of attention, the sweep of action, the arrested moment, the pressure between people.” —-Bebe Miller

 

 

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Process, Tendency, Uncategorized

Tagged: , , , ,

Preview: Bebe Miller Company, Memory Set

Posted on November 24th, 2013

“I am very interested in the layers of remembered events we pass through daily.  Humans are built on memory.” —– Bebe Miller

Image from Video of Verge Redux, January 2013. (Pictured from Left: Bebe Miller, Angie Hauser, Darrell Jones)

As we work to complete our TWO project and prepare the assets for publication in the interface developed by Motion Bank, I thought it would be nice to post a few images and quotes from choreographers Thomas Hauert and Bebe Miller. In a series of posts starting today I will sample what we will premiere next week.

 

The Motion Bank interface is set up in “sets” that are devised by the makers but they also hope that in the future, visitors to the site will be able to make their own preferred sets of related information. The four sets that we have curated for this premiere on Thursday November 28th focus on a handful of the mind/body strategies that these makers use in creating performance improvisation. For example, Bebe Miller has a longstanding interest in memory and the histories we carry in our bodies. One strategy she and her company have devised over the years is a way of working they call Redux.

 

In our Memory Set for Motion Bank, we have video, textual scores, information graphics, and two interactive games that bring you into an encounter with Miller’s work and the possibilities of memory as rich resource for creativity.

Screenshot from Redux Interactive

“There is an aspect of improvisation that asks you to shuffle through the various layers of right now in order to respond directly to the situation. We as a company have invested many years in researching this relationship between memory and the dynamics of body/mind/place/time. Redux is one example of this. ” —– Bebe Miller

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Habit, Memory, Motion capture, Philosphy, Tendency

Tagged: , , , , ,

Risky Weight in Bebe Miller’s work

Posted on July 12th, 2013

One of the ongoing interests in our project is Bebe Miller Company’s use of what they call Risky Weight. In developing our terminology, Norah and graduate research assistant Malory Spicer have been compiling descriptions of Risky Weight from the dancers, Bebe, Talvin Wilks the dramaturge, and our consulting Laban Movement Analyst Melanie Bales. When reading these descriptions I was drawn to this definition of Risky Weight: the whole weight is a little more at risk and less linear and sequential to the body.

 

As we were working on this concept, Norah asked me about the possibility of tracking center of gravity in motion capture data and adding this information to our understanding of Risky Weight, a concept that has to do both with the viewer’s perception and the dancer’s use of his or her weight and gravity. To open this description further I assumed that this means creating situations when a performer’s body gets close to losing its balance, subsequently gaining stability.

 

In researching center (and line) of gravity and base of support in relationship to risky weight I discovered several perspectives on the estimation and perception of body balance. The precise biomechanics based estimation requires knowing the body weight and considering percentage of that weight associated with particular part of a body (see calculations detail in this ASU Biomechanics explanation).  The visual perception perspective, based on the qualitative approach to this problem in animation is reflected in the collection of tutorials at the Animation Physics website.  It demonstrates that a less precise approach to estimating center of gravity is still valid as long as the main principle is followed:

The body is off balance when the Center of Gravity (CG) is outside the Base of Support (BS). Thus the most stable position is when the two overlap (ie the person is laying flat on the floor), the next best thing is when the CG is directly above the BS.

 

Since Motionbuilder (our motion capture processing software) provides a basic operator which can estimate the CG (not as precise as biomechanics approach, but perhaps close enough), I used it to visualize the relationship of Center of Gravity, Line of Gravity (vertical line passing through the CG into the ground) and Base of Support. This exploration in Bebe’s work seems useful since the risk the performer takes is that of falling, which happens when their body is off balance.

 

In order to establish the BS I connected each foot’s ball and heel joints of the mocap skeleton into a rectangle stretched between the two feet.  The BS is reduced to a triangle when one of the joints is off the ground and to the area of one foot when the other foot is lifted. My threshold for when the foot is considered to be off the ground is set to 20cm to avoid excessive flickering caused by frequent shape change for the base of support, this can certainly be adjusted for higher precision if necessary.

 

This quick study may reveal that the qualitatively observed risky weight aspect of Darrell’s performance probably does not come from the state of physical imbalance. The occurrences and durations of this state are not that significant. Again, I am inclined to hypothesize that the viewer’s anticipation of the body becoming off balance is what creates the impression of Risky Weight but there is more to be explored here.

 

– Vita Berezina-Blackburn, Animation Specialist/ACCAD

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Contributing Authors, Motion capture, Process

Momentum in Bebe Miller’s work

Posted on July 8th, 2013

In examining the motion capture work from our January residency with Bebe Miller Company we are becoming interested in the possibility of tracing the momentum transfer through the body. The paths of momentum transfer reveal patterns of movement sequencing in the body. In both Darrell’s and Angie’s performances it is evident that several motions often happen concurrently. Performative tendencies that focus on simultaneity and dis-coordination of body segment motions are likely to interrupt viewer’s ability to anticipate movement and thus create fresh and surprising performance qualities.

 

There are a number of ways to approach visual representation of movement sequencing, and I thought it might be interesting to see this by making visible the sequences of joint rotations.  To set up this visualization I hypothesized that the initiating joint would rotate first, sending the waves of sequential rotations to the other parts of the body.  In the video of Darrell’s performance it is easy to notice many instances when sequences of joint rotations are initiated simultaneously or with minor offsets in time . I have used color coding to present two types of joint movement analysis.  The red figure indicates angular/rotation speed of joints (A) (the brighter the red the higher the speed), the green figure indicates linear speed of joints’ locomotion (L). As opposed to joint rotation speed, visualization of the linear (joint translation through space) shows a more even speed value distribution that is more sequential.

 

Since these may be a bit hard to notice at high playback speed of the captured motion this movie is at 1/4th speed.

 

While working on ideas about momentum I ran across a video on momentum transfer in parkour.   In this video, the second jump comes as a surprise. In order to get additional momentum to make the second jump possible, the landing position after the first jump had to be exaggerated… At a quick glance the shape of the body at the time of the first landing seemed to be that of trying to slow down.  By exaggerating this pose through leaning back and further lifting the arms backwards, it is possible to gain additional momentum. This hidden quality of getting the additional momentum is very intriguing as it also serves as a way of hiding anticipation of subsequent action. This triggers parallels between the animation concepts of motion anticipation and exaggeration and Bebe Miller’s ideas of “interrupting the inevitable” as well as “furthering”.

 

– Vita Berezina-Blackburn, Animation Specialist/ACCAD

Categories: Animation, Bebe Miller Company, Contributing Authors, Motion capture, Process

Tagged: ,

Dancer Awareness

Posted on July 16th, 2012

In response to our post Broader Notions of Two, Amsterdam-based dancer and researcher Bertha Bermudez wrote this very thoughtful reply:   “I keep thinking on what you wrote about two-ness in relation to time, space, social relations and the first main word I keeep thinking of is awareness. The act of reflection that is implied when dancing is, for me, the trigger of many of the forms of two-ness you are describing. When executing an action we are constantly busy with the path of it, or its evolution. Such a state needs of our attention to be placed on past events while executing new ones. Our present is a constant relationship between past experiences and their outcomes: potentials. We are then always split into…

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Contributing Authors, Dancer, Duet, Process

Tagged: , , , ,

Broader Notions of Two

Posted on June 12th, 2012

We started this project with an interest in working at a smaller scale then our previous project and focusing on choreographic ideas as they unfold between two people in the duet form. This was a natural link to Bebe Miller’s new work “A History” which focuses on the choreographic relationship between her and two of her dancers, Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones, over several years and their individual and collective movement histories.   As we delved into this we became less concerned with the nature of the duet per se and instead were drawn into the different movement identities, tensions, and synergies that dancers and choreographers negotiate within their own bodies and with and between each other. This is particularly evident because we are involved…

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Duet, Philosphy, Process

Tagged: , , ,

Word Cloud of Bebe’s Movement Direction

Posted on May 23rd, 2012

Norah and I have been working on establishing a vocabulary that we could use to better discuss some of the choreographic tendencies that Bebe employs in her work.  We started from the vocabulary we gleaned from our conversations with Bebe about the work and our residency with the company.  To test some of this vocabulary development we invited Bebe to direct OSU dance student Erik Speth during a motion capture session.  When directing Erik, we asked Bebe to work within the specific subset of her ideas that we had summarized.  Bebe and Erik worked with some phrase material that they had already been rehearsing for a Spring performance as well as some improv that was shaped by Bebe’s descriptive direction.   Aside from the…

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Process

Tagged: ,

Motion Capture for Analysis

Posted on May 14th, 2012

We have done several optical motion captures with Angie and Darrell.  In our January motion capture session, they were both asked to start with some improvisation as Bebe directed them towards her choreographic interests. This was a session intended to capture some of Bebe’s choreographic tendencies as a numeric representation. As we have found in the past,  the visual reduction aspect of motion capture, in which only the motion capture “skeleton” represents the body,  is most helpful when reading complex motion.  Analysis of the numbers, values and their relationships will take us longer.  We are currently pouring through this data, which contains many frames and layers of information on joint angles, timing and spacing. What is optical motion capture? – Our optical system uses…

Categories: Bebe Miller Company, Motion capture, Technology

Bebe Miller honored with Doris Duke Artist Award

Posted on May 2nd, 2012

Amazing news for two motion bank artists Bebe Miller and Deborah Hay, the Doris Duke Foundation announced its first “class” of Doris Duke Performing Artists Awards.

 

Press Release

 

THE DORIS DUKE CHARITABLE FOUNDATION AWARDS MORE THAN $5.5 MILLION TO THE FIRST CLASS OF DORIS DUKE ARTISTS
 
21 Outstanding Performing Artists Are the First Participants in an Unprecedented Nationwide Initiative to Expand Artistic and Personal Freedom for Creative Leaders in the Fields of Jazz, Contemporary Dance and Theatre.
 
NEW YORK, NY, April 19, 2012 — Twenty-one of America’s most vital and productive performing artists in contemporary dance, jazz, theatre and multidisciplinary work were announced today as the first class of Doris Duke Artists, sharing a total of $5.775 million awarded in an unprecedented new initiative of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF). Each member of the first class will receive an unrestricted, multi-year cash grant of $225,000, plus as much as $50,000 more in targeted support for retirement savings and audience development. Creative Capital, DDCF’s primary partner in the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards, will also offer the awardees the opportunity to take part in professional development activities, financial and legal counseling, and grantee gatherings—all designed to help them maximize the use of their grants.
 
DDCF is granting these awards as part of a $50 million, ten-year commitment over and above its existing funding for the performing arts. By the end of the ten years, DDCF will have offered a total of at least 200 artists greatly expanded freedom to create, through an initiative that makes available the largest allocation of unrestricted cash grants ever given to individuals in contemporary dance, jazz, theatre and related fields. Provided to honorees through a rigorous, anonymous process of peer review—no applications are accepted—the grants are not tied to any specific project but are made as investments in the artists’ personal and professional development and future work.
 
DDCF is naming the first Doris Duke Artists in the year that marks the centenary of the birth of Doris Duke (1912-1993). The 2012 inaugural award recipients are:
• • •
Anne Bogart, theatre (New York, NY) Don Byron, jazz (New York, NY) Wally Cardona, dance (Brooklyn, NY) •  Rinde Eckert, multidisciplinary performance (Upper Nyack, NY) •    Bill Frisell, jazz (Seattle, WA) •    Deborah Hay, dance (Austin, TX) •    John Hollenbeck, jazz (Binghamton, NY) • Vijay Iyer, jazz (New York, NY) •  Marc Bamuthi Joseph, multidisciplinary performance (Oakland, CA) •    Elizabeth LeCompte, theatre (New York, NY) •  Young Jean Lee, theatre (Brooklyn, NY) •  Ralph Lemon, dance (New York, NY) •    Richard Maxwell, theatre (Brooklyn, NY) •  Sarah Michelson, dance (Brooklyn, NY) •  Bebe Miller, dance (New York, NY and Columbus, OH) •  Nicole Mitchell, jazz (Long Beach, CA and Chicago, IL) •  Meredith Monk, multidisciplinary performance (New York, NY) •  Eiko Otake, dance (New York, NY) •  Takashi Koma Otake, dance (New York, NY) •  Basil Twist, theatre (New York, NY) •  Reggie Wilson, dance (Brooklyn, NY)

Categories: Bebe Miller Company

Tagged: , ,