Contact improvisation in the context of social dance of the XX century: features of the open dance form "jam"

Contact improvisation in the context of social dance of the XX century: features of the open dance form "jam" The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of contact improvisation as a practice of social dance of the XXI century and to determine the specifics of its implementation in the unique dance form "jam". Research methodology. A comprehensive method of studying the features of contact improvisation in the context of a social dance of the XXI century, a historical method, thanks to which the details of the development of contact improvisation have been clarified; the method of functional and systems analysis, which contributed to the study of contact improvisation as a unique hybrid practice; a phenomenological method that helped to highlight the essential features and identify the key elements of contact improvisation in the dance form "jam", etc. The scientific novelty consists in expanding the theoretical basis for analyzing the phenomenon of contact improvisation; clarifying the concept of "contact improvisation"; the features of the practice of contact improvisation in the context of the specificity of social dance are investigated on the basis of the analysis of its physical and mental components; analyzed the main elements of contact improvisation (inaction, weighing/carrying, falling, playing, discussing, observing, touching) through the prism of the unique open dance form "jam". Conclusions. Contact improvisation is based on communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact, and the cumulative relationship of physical laws governing their motion - the laws of gravity, momentum, and inertia. In accordance with the specifics of social dance, contact improvisation is a tool for studying one's own capabilities, a model of human relations and meditative practice, which creates the preconditions for further development, providing a huge space of freedom and ease of performance of one or another dance element, removes the restrictions imposed by choreography, allows you to move like this, as the dancer wants, without tension, provides new material for self-knowledge and exploration of relationships, is a source of inspiration and a way of expressing the creative energy that is in the body. Contact improvisation, as a hybrid practice, works at the crossroads between body meditation, psycho-kinesthetic therapy, sports training, and dance improvisation and, in the context of the specifics of social dance, is implemented at improvisational meetings of contactees, the so-called jams, at the local and national level. Keywords: contact improvisation, social dance, jams, dance practice, dance form.

Exploring Physiology-Based Interactions in Performing Art Using Artistic Interventions / Kunstiliste sekkumiste kasutamine füsioloogiapõhiste interaktsioonide uurimiseks etenduskunstis

Technological innovations like physiological computing offer new possibilities when exploring audience-performer interaction. To avoid technological solutionism that often accompanies biosensor applications in performing art, an artistic interventions approach was used. This paper describes a recent art-science residency consisting of three artistic experiments: the audience’s electrodermal, activity-driven soundscape in a dance improvisation, a “lie detector” applied to the actor just after the performance, and a heart-rate-driven personal discotheque installation. Both artist and scientist provide reflections on future development of this transdisciplinary field from the performing art perspective. Nüüdisaegne interaktiivne teater toetub tehnoloogilistele uuendustele ja järjest enam kasutatakse uusi tehnoloogiaid ka kunstiteose sisu loomisel: on need siis vaatajate reaktsioone tajuvad riided, voogteatri etendus või vaatajate neurofüsioloogilisi reaktsioone mõõtvad sensorid. Etenduskunstnik Taavet Jansen ja neuroteadlane Aleksander Väljamäe töötasid publiku ja esinejate füsioloogiliste reaktsioonidega kunstiteaduse residentuuris Tallinna Ülikoolis veebruarist 2019 kuni juunini 2019. Füsioloogilisi reaktsioone uuriti kolme kunstilise eksperimendi jooksul või järel ning see artikkel kirjeldabki neid eksperimente, kunstniku mõtisklusi oma uurimisreisist ja arutleb, kuidas selliseid interaktsioonivõimalusi saaks kasutada voogteatri platvormidel. Iga kirjeldatud eksperimendi kohta avaldavad autorid ka oma mõtteid ja teevad ettepanekuid, mida eksperimendi kordamisel võiks teha teistmoodi. Kunstilises eksperimendis „Neurokoreograafiline eksperiment nr 4“ kasutati interaktiivset lahendust, kus neljale vaatajale kinnitatud sensorid mõõtsid nende erutuse taset (electrodermal activity galvanic skin response) improvisatsioonilise tantsuetenduse vältel Tallinnas, Kanuti Gildi SAALis 06.06.2019. Vaatajate reaktsioone kasutati reaalajas helikujunduse manipuleerimisel. Selline interaktiivne lahendus tekitas kunstiliselt intrigeeriva tagasiside-efekti, kus vaatajate tahtmatud reaktsioonid hakkasid mõjutama kogu lavastuse tervikut. Vaatajad said tahtmatult endale „hääle“, mida said interpreteerida kõik osalised kogu terviku kontekstis. Kunstilises eksperimendis „Macbeth“ kasutati erutust mõõtvaid sensoreid, salvestamaks näitleja reaktsioone intervjuu ajal, kus esitati küsimusi tema rolliloome kohta etenduses, mis oli lõppenud 10 minutit enne intervjuu algust. Tegemist oli Alo Kõrve Macbethi rolliga Tallinna Linnateatri lavastuses „Macbeth“. Prokurör Steven-Hristo Evestuse läbi viidud intervjuu eesmärgiks oli mõista, milliseid tehnikaid kasutab näitleja oma rolli luues, ning tehnoloogiat kasutades analüüsida, kas näitleja on teadlik laval tehtud otsustest. Heli- ja valgusinstallatsioon „Heartrate Party“ põhines kontseptsioonil, kus külastaja südamerütm mõjutas kogu installatsiooni heli- ja valguskujunduse tempot. Südamerütmi mõõdeti spetsiaalse sensoriga ja kasutatud videokujundus nii instrueeris osalejaid kui ka andis tagasisidet õnnestumisest või ebaõnnestumisest. Installatsioon oli avatud Tallinnas, Kanuti Gildi SAALi keldrisaalis 05.–07.06.2020 ja seda külastas 20 vaatajat. aasta esimeses pooles, kui COVID-19 pandeemia põhjustas eriolukorra kogu maailmas, ei tohtinud teatrid ja etendusasutused avalikke üritusi korraldada. Teatrid hakkasid oma etendusi andma voogedastust võimaldavatel platvormidel. Kuna voogteater avab etenduste mängimiseks palju uusi võimalusi, siis me analüüsime residentuuris kasutatud kontseptsioone ka voogteatri perspektiivist. Kõiki eelpool mainitud kontseptsioone oleks võimalik osaliselt kanda üle ka veebikeskkonda, kuid need eeldavad kasutajapoolset tehnoloogilist valmisolekut. Sensortehnoloogiad võimaldavad voogteatri etenduste vaatajate reaktsioone ja käitumist analüüsida ja salvestada. Kuna nende tehnoloogiate kasutus sellises kontekstis on veel uus, siis küsimused, mis puudutavad eetikat ja isikuandmeid, vajavad alles väljatöötamist. Kokkuvõttes väidame, et väga palju uurimistööd on alles ees ja meetodid, kuidas interpreteerida esinejatelt ja vaatajatelt kogutud andmeid, on alles vaja välja töötada. Tihti kasutatakse andmeid interaktsiooni eesmärgil pigem otseseid tõlgendusi luues – biosignaalide numbriline väärtus tõlgitakse otse mõneks audiovisuaalses kujunduses oluliseks väärtuseks. Selline tõlgendus annab küll laval toimuvale perfektse sünkrooni, kuid vastust jääb ootama oluline küsimus, mida need andmed väljendavad, mida nad tähendavad. Kunstis jääb tihti puudu teoreetilistest teadmistest, mis aitaksid intuitiivselt tehtud kunstilisi otsuseid raamistada. Selline teadmiste ülekandmine kunsti ja teaduse vahel avaks uusi võimalusi kunstiteoste interpreteerimisel, aga ka teaduse rikastamisel.

AllPlay Dance: Two Pilot Dance Projects for Children With Disability, Developed and Assessed With a Dance Studies Approach

AllPlay Dance is founded on a collaborative approach to research between the School of Psychology and the School of Communication of Creative Arts, both of Deakin University. The research is also undertaken in partnership with professional ballet company, Queensland Ballet. This paper describes the development and execution of two pilot projects for children with disability, utilizing a dance studies methodology. The projects were conducted in 2018 and 2019 for children with cerebral palsy (CP) and autism spectrum disorder, as part of the AllPlay Dance program. Participants with disabilities ranged in age from 7 to 12 years. As well as describing the approach to the program development, we discuss the involvement of older and more experienced buddies who were included as a method to support the participation in dance of children with disabilities. We will also describe the diffusion of authorship in the making of group dances as a tool for inclusion and the premise of dance as a social practice in which participants inter-subjectively generate meaning and sense making. The AllPlay Dance projects were developed as a series of dance classes in which participants worked with set or learned movement material, dance improvisation, and tasks for movement generation in order to collectively generate a dance for performance. This paper focuses on the aim of developing inclusive approaches to dance classes that challenge “ableist” notions of dance as spectacle to enable to work toward building transferable programs to allow all children who so desire and to participate in dance in their communities.

Stepping back: Reflecting on accessibility in integrated dance improvisation

Finding more accessible ways to train, create, perform and work is a major concern of researchers and practitioners (Ajula & Redding, 2013, 2014) of integrated and disability dance. In the spring of 2017 eight dancer/researchers from CRIPSiE, an integrated, disability and crip dance company located in Edmonton, came together to investigate their practices of timing through a participatory performance creation process. Participatory performance creation values researcher reflexivity (Heron & Reason, 1997). In this paper I reflect on the way that collaboratively building an improvisation score, a series of tasks and prompts that the dancer/researchers responded to (Gere, 2003), created inaccessibility for one of the dancers/researchers, Robert. At the time I assumed that improvisation itself was inaccessible. Upon reflecting I realized that the improvisation was accessible and that Robert was improvising in ways valued by both the integrated improvisation literature and the other dancers/researchers.

Shared Diminished Reality: A New VR Framework for the Study of Embodied Intersubjectivity

Shaping both the environment and the embodiment of the users in that virtual world, VR offers designers and cognitive scientists the unprecedented potential to virtually explore a vast set of interactions between persons, and persons and their environment. By design, VR tools offer a formidable opportunity to revisit the links between body movement and lived experiences, and to experiment with them in a controlled, yet engaging and ecologically valid manner. In our multidisciplinary research-creation project we ask, how can we design (virtual) environments that specifically encourage interactions between multiple persons and that allow designers, scientists, and participants (users or “immersants”) to explore the very process of interaction itself? Building on our combined experience with dance improvisation research and interactive virtual spatial design, we document a multi-user VR experience design approach we name Shared Diminished Reality (SDR), where immersants are co-present and able to move together while their bodies and the environment are represented in a minimalist way. Our working hypothesis is that non-anthropomorphic embodiment of oneself and one’s partner(s), combined with open-ended exploration, focuses the user’s attention on the quality of the interaction and encourages playfulness and creativity. We present the articulations VR platform and its design history, as well as design evaluations of SDR in a laboratory setting and through a mixed reality performance, interrogating the impact of our minimalist approach on user experience and on the quality of the interaction. Our results suggest that minimizing (self and other) representation in Shared Diminished Reality positively impacts relational dynamics, induces playful creativity, and fosters the will to move and improvise together.

Unplanned Coordination: Ensemble Improvisation as Collective Action

The characteristic features of ensemble dance improvisation (EDI) make it an interesting case for theories of intentional collective action. These features include the high degree of freedom enjoyed by each individual, and the lack of fixed hierarchical roles, rigid decision procedures, or detailed plans. We present a “reductive” approach to collective action, apply it to EDI, and show how the theory enriches our perspective on this practice. We show, with the help of our theory of collective action, that EDI (as typically practiced) constitutes a significant collective achievement, one that manifests an impressive, spontaneous, jointly cooperative and individually highly autonomous activity that meets demanding aesthetic standards. Its being good in this way is not a mere extrinsic feature of the artwork, but part of its aesthetic value. We end by discussing how this value is easily missed by classic aesthetics, but is revealed by more contemporary frameworks like social aesthetics.

Improvisation and thinking in movement: an enactivist analysis of agency in artistic practices

In this article, we inquire into Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Michele Merritt’s descriptions and use of dance improvisation as it relates to “thinking in movement.” We agree with them scholars that improvisational practices present interesting cases for investigating how movement, thinking, and agency intertwine. However, we also find that their descriptions of improvisation overemphasize the dimension of spontaneity as an intuitive “letting happen” of movements. To recalibrate their descriptions of improvisational practices, we couple Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. Barandiaran’s (2017) enactive account of the constitution of agency with case studies of two expert performers of improvisation: a dancer and a musician. Our analyses hereof show that their improvisations unfold as a sophisticated oscillation of agency between specialized forms of mental and bodily control and, indeed, a more spontaneous “letting things happen.” In all, this article’s conclusions frame thinking in movement concerning improvisational practices as contextually embedded, purposively trained, and inherently relational.

Mix(tap)ing: A method for sampling the past to envision the future

This article outlines the theoretical and aesthetic considerations of Love’s performance-as-research method for developing interdisciplinary tap dance work – a method he identifies as Mix(tap)ing. By first narrating how he arrived to his current practice as a dancemaker and artistic researcher, Love is able to show the ways in which his method samples strategies, voices and traditions from the cultural past to imagine and work towards futuristic locations of liberation and possibility. Ultimately, Mix(tap)ing allows Love to layer intellectual concepts and theatrical conventions in order to design an approach to rhythm tap dance improvisation and choreography that is expressly Black and queer. This article is, in itself, a demonstration of Love’s method as it joins written analysis with a performed lecture script to evidence how Love has previously presented one of his Mix(tap)es.