Motion Bank: Two

Re-imagining Choreographic Ideas

Posts from the “Process” 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

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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

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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

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Establishing Vocabularies for Better Collaborative Work

Posted on June 19th, 2013

A critical step within multidisciplinary collaborative work involves establishing a consistent group vocabulary or taxonomy to name what we are talking about.  This must be followed by establishing agreement within the group about the term and its meaning.   We are currently working on framing the “story” we want to tell about the choreographers’ work.  As part of that process we have begun to identify elements that we observe in the choreographic ideas of Bebe and Thomas’s work.  This naming of elements is to help us to communicate within our working group.  Some of the terms come through in discussion and some were pointed out and given terms by the choreographers and/or their dancers.  In the initial stage we are concerned with the naming…

Categories: Process

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Careful Scientist Choice and Timing Analysis

Posted on June 16th, 2013

In an effort to make visible the choices that each performer makes in performing the Careful Scientist exercise, we devised a motion capture analysis algorithm to track data captured in different performers execution of the Careful Scientist.   OSU graduate research assistant J. Eisenmann designed the algorithm which is run on the motion capture files and identifies which action is happening on which arm and over what amount of time (in frames).   An example of the data list that the algorithm generates from one of Thomas Hauert’s motion captured performances of the exercise:   Who   Frame, Action,    L/R side ———————————— Thomas,1591,3_ElbowFlex,L, Thomas,1645,1_UpperArmPointing,R, Thomas,1877,4_ForearmRotation,L, Thomas,2086,3_ElbowFlex,R, Thomas,2262,1_UpperArmPointing,L, Thomas,2470,2_ShoulderRotation,R, Thomas,2766,4_ForearmRotation,L, Thomas,2955,3_ElbowFlex,R, Thomas,3154,1_UpperArmPointing,L, Thomas,3478,4_ForearmRotation,L, Thomas,3533,1_UpperArmPointing,R, Thomas,3751,3_ElbowFlex,L, Thomas,4007,3_ElbowFlex,R, Thomas,4190,4_ForearmRotation,L,   After the algorithm generates the data list, we then…

Categories: Motion capture, Process, Thomas Hauert Zoo Company, Uncategorized

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Building an Algorithmic Model of the Careful Scientist

Posted on June 15th, 2013

For the past several months of this project, we have been focused on understanding and deconstructing Thomas Hauert’s choreographic tool, the Careful Scientist.  The Careful Scientist is an exercise used by Hauert and his company  to develop improvisation skills and encourage reflection on human anatomy and consciousness. The exercise involves a very specific set of four actions on joints in the arms. Working within a set of constraints, the dancer generates sequences of these four actions – an activity which helps to retrain tendencies and develop new possibilities for performance.

 

As seen in the video above, Hauert establishes the following four actions:

  1. Changing the direction the upper arm points in space
  2. Keeping the direction of the upper arm and rotating it around the shoulder axis
  3. Extending or flexing the elbow
  4. Rotating the forearm

The constraints of this exercise are then to simultaneously execute these actions in the left and right arm, to avoid symmetry of actions in the two arms, and to work towards overlapping motion – adding changes in duration and amplitudes to stagger the start and end time of actions on the two sides.

 

The exercise can be performed at increasing levels of complexity. Hauert often begins by demonstrating the exercise without the element of overlapping timing – by stopping and starting actions on the left and right sides simultaneously. More complexity can be added to the task by including the legs, knees, and hips while lying in a horizontal position. From performing this exercise, one becomes aware of the bimanual nature of movement programmed into the human body and through practice is able to overcome these tendencies.

 

The first level of our analysis was to use the motion capture data of Thomas performing the Careful Scientist and apply it to more mechanical, robotic digital models.  Observing the Careful Scientist from an outsider’s perspective – this activity seems very robotic, calculated, and unnatural.  The robot model was designed so that each of the joints was indicative of the nature of movement it can accommodate and to remove some of that complexity and ambiguity of the human body.  This visualization made certain attributes of the actions evident, such as axes and limits of rotation which facilitated a clearer articulation of the rules of the exercise for us as researchers.

 

An algorithm was then written by graduate research assistant J. Eisenmann to generate the same kind of Careful Scientist data. This data, rotation orientations over time, was similar to that which we had gathered with motion capture.  In this step we define parameters of movement based on Thomas’s rules, through code. Processing was used to create the program with the constraints and limited actions of the Careful Scientist exercise and to generate ‘performance data’ comparable to that of a live dancer. This algorithmic data was then applied to the robotic arm models and juxtaposed in this video.

 

 

Comparison and contrast of the two highlighted the unavoidable ‘human-ness’ of the motion capture data compared to that which was computer generated. ‘Human-ness’ is used here in a very loose sense to include a several observations:

  • There is a difference in isolation of movement: The human data looks ‘noisy’ as it includes some natural secondary motion and sway that comes with the human body. The computer is able to isolate one single point of rotation at a time and thus appears more static
  • Overshoot and Recoil: In a world without momentum or gravity, the algorithmic robot arms can stop a motion immediately whereas with the human data there are the elements of overshoot and recoil when a joint stops moving in one direction and another action begins
  • Fluidity of Motion: The previous observations discussed also lead into the idea of fluidity in the appearance of the motion. The human arms ease in and out of actions which feel much more connected while the algorithm’s movement is more staccato in a sense
  • Data analysis of the human performance reveals ‘errors’: There are moments where dancers violate the constraints of the exercise (performing the same action on both arms, using an action twice in a row, etc.) These types of mistakes are not made by a computer program
  • Tendencies within the constraints: Human data show preference for certain actions or action sequences; also Hauert typically rotates a joint such as the elbow the full extent of rotation rather than stopping somewhere in the middle. The algorithmic version appears to have more ‘randomness’ of motion

In reflection, this visualization was a helpful tool in defining the Careful Scientist for ourselves and identifying the inner-body conflicts Hauert seeks to overcome. It could be helpful in explaining the Careful Scientist exercise for new audiences to show the rules on a simplified form such as the robot model rather than a human arm. This tool would not necessarily be conducive for communicating Hauert’s larger themes in his work and goals for movement generation to a broader audience, however.

 

–Malory Spicer, Graduate Research Assistant, ACCAD

Categories: Animation, Process, Thomas Hauert Zoo Company

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Thomas Hauert and the Art of Performance Improvisation

Posted on October 19th, 2012

“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…

Categories: Philosphy, Process, Thomas Hauert Zoo Company, Uncategorized

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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

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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

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