Motion Bank: Two

Re-imagining Choreographic Ideas

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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

 

Preview: Thomas Hauert, Impulse Set

Posted on November 27th, 2013

Impulses are starting points initiated without a plan being made on how the entire movement is going to develop. In this conception of movement, you don’t have an intellectual image of a whole sequence of motion but you expose your body to impulses, you vary and accumulate rules, initiations, directions, connections, tensions, release, and let the solutions emerge. —-Thomas Hauert

From left, Mat Voortner, Sara Ludi and Thomas Hauert demonstrating one external impulse strategy for priming the dancer's attention

From left, Mat Voorter, Sara Ludi and Thomas Hauert demonstrating one external impulse strategy for priming the dancer's attention

Interactive Attentive Agent, an algorithmic metaphor for Pressure Assisted Solo strategy devised by Thomas Hauert

The body keeps finding solutions to the most complex and unpredictable cocktails of forces and directions imposed on it is exhilarating and liberating way. —- Thomas Hauert

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

 

 

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

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)