scholarly journals Dance and Interactivity

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Birringer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Motion Capture ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
International Community ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Motion Studies

A growing number of practitioners in the international community of choreographers and performers has begun to experiment with computer-assisted work linking dance and new technologies. This hardly comes as a surprise, since dance-on-film and videodance had already attracted considerable attention, at least since the 1980s. Earlier experiments, such as the astonishing films by Maya Deren, take us back to the 1940s, and today's motion capture-based animations find their historical roots in late nineteenth century motion studies in chronophotography and early cinema (Muybridge, Marey, Méliès). Furthermore, dancemakers, researchers, and teachers have used film or video as a vital means of documenting or analyzing existing choreographies. Some scholars and software programmers published tools (LabanWriter, LifeForms) that attracted attention in the field of dance notation and preservation as well as among choreographers (e.g., Merce Cunningham) who wanted to utilize the computer for the invention and visualization of new movement possibilities.

Dazzling the Multitude Original Media Spectacles

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Point To Point

Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.

The Technical Transformation of the Late Nineteenth-Century Gas Industry

1987 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 967-980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Technological Transformation ◽  
Gas Industry ◽  
Coal Gas ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Firm Model ◽  
The Cost

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.

Directors/Directing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Switzky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Electric Light

Although some official has organized the acting and scenery in theatrical performances since ancient Greece, the director only emerged as a significant creative figure in the late nineteenth century. Directors introduced innovative acting methods, modernized staging through new technologies such as electric light and mechanized scenery, proposed theories about the function of the theater in social and political life, and provided unified interpretations of complex plays. As the self-designated authors of productions, directors often competed with playwrights and actors for artistic control, a tension that continues to characterize the division of labor in theaters.

Uncovering the Histories and Pre-Histories of Queer Tango: Contextualizing and Documenting an Innovative Form of Social Dancing

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 24-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Batchelor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
International Community ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
Social Dancing ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Attempting to uncover and document the history, or rather histories and pre-histories, of queer tango is difficult. Superficially, the history ought to be easy. The term “queer tango” barely existed before 2001 when it was first used by LGBT dancers in Hamburg, Germany. It was perceived of by them as a riposte to “hetero-normative” leader-follower relationships in mainstream Argentinian tango, proposing instead women as leaders, men as followers, same sex couples and “active” rather than passive followers. Queer tango has subsequently been characterized by the emergence around the world of queer tango organizations, of international festivals, and an international community of dancers, thriving by contact through social media. Yet as the author, who is collaborating with writers and dancers Birthe Havmøller and Olaya Aramo in editing The Queer Tango Book, an online anthology of writings about queer tango, has found out, there is still no settled agreement as to what, precisely, the term means; there is disagreement about the premise that “hetero-normative” tango was quite as oppressive to women in the ways it was originally made out to be, and there is no agreement—indeed so far, precious little discussion—as to which dance practices in Buenos Aires and beyond from the late nineteenth century onward might legitimately be enlisted as forming the pre-history. Were the men-only prácticas, which ran for decades, a part of it? Or women teaching each other at home? When so little was written down, how is one to find out?

Looking Backward

Queer Timing ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 101-121
Author(s):  
Susan Potter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Specific Response ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Electric Light ◽  
Stage Performances

This chapter focuses on an expanded visual archive that is emblematic of the intermediality of early cinema: the electric light dance performances of late-nineteenth-century celebrity Loïe Fuller and their early film copies. The chapter argues that Fuller’s on-stage performances, and the cinematic remediations that imitated her disembodied modes of performance, represent a specific response to, and transformation of, conditions of vision, practices of looking, and modes of voyeurism that had until recently been cultural norms for women. Fuller’s visual archive suggests how the developing sexual subjectivities of female spectators were already bound up in proto-cinematic forms of spectatorship that turned on the visual pleasures of the moving female body. Appropriating and reorienting the sexuality effects of late-nineteenth-century visual culture, Fuller’s performances sustained a paradoxically disembodied and depersonalized homoerotic mode of spectatorship.

Traces, Specks, and Glimmers

Queer Timing ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Susan Potter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Sexual Knowledge ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The early cinema of attractions evidences a capacity for generating unruly and multivalent forms of erotic attraction and visual pleasure, even as it also registers transformations in sexual knowledge and experiences of embodied desire and erotic identity. The chapter argues that attempts in early films to eroticize sexual difference and establish a gendered scopic hierarchy also represent a discursive effort to transform—by visually de-privileging, suppressing, or eliding—the differently ordered homoerotic visual pleasures and practices of looking of the late nineteenth century. These often forgotten moments of disrupted same-sex intimacy or voyeurism demonstrate the expansion of discourses of sexuality and nascent efforts to discipline the homoerotic, even as their effects remain fleeting and unpredictable.

Resisting Arrest

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Hornby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ocean Waves ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Motion Studies

This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are blurred and impressionistic—ocean waves, clouds of dust, puffs of steam and smoke—which render motion itself a kind of obscurity and reveal how film is itself an ephemeral medium of dust and smoke. The precursor to film’s absent materiality is found in photography’s own representation of motion as blur in Etienne-Jules Marey’s strange late nineteenth-century photographs of smoke fillets and the movements of air. These images, lesser known than his other motion studies, reveal how film casts back to its still antecedent to imagine motion in blurred terms of smoke and dust, even as it resists photographic arrest.

Greens of Glasgow: ‘We Want “U” In’

Film Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet McBain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Business ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Film History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Silent Era

This short essay draws on research undertaken by the curator of the Scottish Screen Archive on the few surviving films credited to Greens Film Service of Glasgow in the teens and twenties. The research revealed a dynamic family business, born out of the travelling cinematograph shows of the late nineteenth century, growing to assume a dominant role in the Scottish cinema trade in the silent era, across exhibition, distribution and production. One small part of a lost film history waiting for rediscovery – early cinema in Scotland.

Muybridge in the Parlor

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-104
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER I. OLSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Motion Studies ◽  
Photographic Studies

Commonly regarded as one of the pioneers of motion-picture technology, Eadweard Muybridge carried out several photographic studies of animal and human movement in the late nineteenth century. One of Muybridge's lesser-known commissions was an album of interior photographs that he created in 1880 for his friends Kate and Robert Johnson. This article offers a close reading of this album and argues that it has more in common with Muybridge's motion studies than historians have previously recognized. Far from being a commercial outlier, the album offered Muybridge an opportunity to experiment with the technological and cultural possibilities of photography in a new way. Through ghosts, mirrors, and other forms of representational excess, these images make visible Muybridge's handiwork as a photographer and the intellectual complexity of his collaboration with Kate and Robert Johnson.

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