Misadventures with Motion Capture

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Untitled design (5)As any performer who has ever worked with technology knows, interfacing human and machine elements is a time-consuming process.  Our experiment with motion capture was no exception.

Fortunately, we had wonderful people to work with – our dancers, Professor Roger Good and his students and staff from the OU School of Digital Media Arts, and Nathan Berger and Rakesh Kashyap from the OU Aesthetic Technology Lab.  The latter two were responsible for the motion capture recording, using a portable MOCAP suit.  This had to be fitted and calibrated on each dancer in order to produce a clean recording.  And this often involved painstaking recalibrations between performances.

It was a very long day, but we managed to record the scales we wanted to capture, along with a dance class exercise, an improvisation, and a section of one of Jean Erdman’s choreographies.  Now even harder work followed, for Madeleine and I had  to learn to read the MOCAP recordings.

While we had certainly captured the trace-forms, they were merely white lines against a black background.  The recording had no visual depth; that is, we could not easily discern which lines represented motion in the front part of kinesphere and which lines represented movements in the dancer’s back space.

Berger and Kashyap came to our rescue here, by creating as skeletal icosahedron that could be superimposed to help us decode the MOCAP tracery.  But this introduced other problems – should the icosahedron turn when the dancer turned, or remain stationary?  Should it tilt if the dancer did, or not?  MOCAP reintroduced issues around systems of reference that have been dealt with in Labanotation.

As with all pilot research projects, Madeleine and I discovered how much we still had to learn.  Nevertheless, a few intriguing findings emerged.  Learn more in the next blogs.

Rehearsing Laban’s Prototypes

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Rehearsing Laban’s PrototypesPolar triangles, axis and girdle scales, primary scales, and the A and B scales – these were the Laban prototypes we wanted to study.  Thus the research project began with a crash course in space harmony for three Ohio University dance faculty (Travis Gatling, Tresa Randall, and Marina Walchi).

We only had three days to prepare our performers (all relative newcomers to Laban theory) for the motion capture/videotaping session.   We wanted the dancers not only to remember the prototypic sequences but also to perform them well.  Consequently, each morning and afternoon rehearsal began with a Bartenieff Fundamentals warm up as an inroad for connecting body and space.

As the week proceeded, the dancers were introduced to the three geographies of the kinesphere – the octahedron, the cube, and the icosahedron.  They learned the dimensional and diagonal scales as Laban’s models of stable and mobile trajectories respectively.  They embodied the cardinal planes, tracing the peripheral edges and central diameters.  They were introduced to transverse movement and learned the A and B scales.

We then moved on to prototypes drawing on the more subtle “deflected directions.”  Thus the dancers were taught the polar triangles, axis and girdle scales, and finally the most complex and counter-intuitive primary scales.

In the final afternoon rehearsal, we jointly decided who would perform each choreutic sequence and worked on fine-tuning the phrasing.  The acid test would start the following morning, when we gathered in the campus TV studio for the motion capture and video recording session.

The “Laban Prototypes” Project

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Laban ChoreuticsIn 2008, Professor Madeleine Scott and I ran a choreutics-based research project at Ohio University.  The project examined Laban’s claim that fragments of the choreutic forms (aka spatial scales and rings) compose a fundamental alphabet of human movement.

The examination had two parts.  First, we set out to duplicate some of the choreutic forms that Laban represented as geometrical line drawings.  Motion capture technology is able to produce a similar kind of record, for it captures the dancer’s movement as a linear tracery of light, allowing one to see the trace-forms of the dance without the dancer.  Secondly, dance class sequences, spontaneously improvised dance passages, and excerpts of a choreographed work were also recorded using motion capture technology.  In addition to the MOCAP recordings, video recordings, taken from front, back, both sides, and above provided additional data for analysis.

The following blogs describe the research process and preliminary findings.

Decoding Choreutics – Key #2

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As an artist-scientist, Laban is concerned not only with the geometry of movement, but also with its expressive meaning.  This dual vision gives rise to his theory of natural affinities between lines of motion and effort qualities.

Decoding Choreutics with Movescape

Laban’s working out of these correlations, introduced in Choreutics in Chapter 3, is intriguing but not entirely original.  The expressive value of line and form has its roots in theory of empathy propounded by late 19th and early 20th century  psychologists and art theorists.

 

According to the theory of empathy, we project our visceral and kinesthetic feelings into the objects we perceive.  In order to be expressive, the art object must possess certain formal qualities, but it need not be represent anything in particular.

 

Art Nouveau artist August Endell went on to spell out the empathic reactions aroused by various kinds of lines.  Straight and curved lines, narrow and wide lines, short and long lines, and the direction of the line were all correlated with various sensations.  For example, length or shortness of a line are functions of time, while the thickness and thinness are functions of tension.

 

I’ve been unable to find a full description of Endell’s system, but it seems to me that the germ of Laban’s theory of effort affinities can be linked back to his days as an Art Nouveau artist.  The fact that effort notation postdates the development of direction symbols suggests that Laban may have assumed that the movement dynamics were inherent in the spatial form.

 

Want more clues for deepening your understanding of Laban’s theories?  Register for “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

Decoding Choreutics – Key #1

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Another example of Laban’s double vision is his concept of the kinesphere and dynamosphere as dual domains of human movement.  To represent both domains, Laban utilizes the cube.

Decoding Choreutics via Movescape

With regard to the kinesphere, Laban uses the cube quite literally.  Its corners, edges, and internal diagonals serve as a kind of longitude and latitude for mapping movement in the space around the dancer’s body.

 

With regard to the dynamosphere, Laban uses the cube formally to represent patterns of effort change.  This shift in how the model should be interpreted is complicated further by Laban’s use of direction symbols to stand for effort qualities and combinations.

 

When Laban wrote Choreutics in 1938-39, the effort symbols had not yet been created.  Consequently, his dual use of direction symbols to stand in for effort obscures the discussion, but not entirely.

 

To decode the models discussed in Chapters 3, 6, and 9, it is only necessary to translate the direction symbols into effort qualities and combinations.  Once this is done, Laban’s discussion of dynamospheric patterns becomes clear.

 

Want more keys?  Register for the correspondence course, “Decoding Laban’s Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

 

“God Geometricizes….” Said Madame Blavatsky

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Artistic and scientific circles were not the only circles that overlapped in the fin de siècle period.  European artists of the period were also involved in various secret spiritual societies that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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For example, the painter Wassily Kandinsky was an ardent follower of Theosophy, one of the occult spiritual movements of the period, and one that was very attractive to artists.  As religious historian Mircea Eliade notes, avant garde European artists “utilized the occult as a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.”

 

Novel spiritual practices were not merely a form of rebellion for the European avant garde.  The occult revival also gave artists new ways to think about the nature of art as it moved beyond representation and symbolism toward formalism and abstraction.  Kandinsky drew upon precepts of Theosophy, such as the quote above by Theosophy guru, Madame Blavatsky, to theorize a spiritual visual art composed of only form and color.   By these means alone, Kandinsky wrote, the artist could “cause vibrations in the soul.”

 

Laban was also attracted to the occult.  During his career as a painter (1899- 1919), he supposedly associated with three esoteric groups:  the Free Masons, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the Rosicrucians.  The extent of Laban’s involvement is a matter of speculation.  Nevertheless, in Choreutics, his treatise on the geometry of human movement, Laban does acknowledge that his subject “necessitates a certain spiritual emphasis.”

 

What does this mean? Find out more in the correspondence course, “Decoding Choreutics,” beginning March 26.

Was Laban Seeing Double?

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More than any of his other books in English, Choreutics reveals Laban’s dual vision as a dance artist and movement scientist.  The forthcoming course, “Decoding Choreutics,” examines Laban’s double vision from more than one angle.

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For example, Choreutics and the whole fabric of Laban’s space harmony theory can be seen as a design source for dance.    The various scales and “rhythmic circles” can be mined as abstract patterns for movement creation.  In this sense, Choreutics is analogous to various design sources utilized by Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the 20th century.

 

The fin de siècle was a time when artistic and scientific circles overlapped. In their stylized renderings of natural forms, Art Nouveau artists drew upon scientific illustrations.  A case in point is Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. Haeckel (1834-1919) was a biologist-philosopher whose beautiful illustrations of biological forms, ranging from microscopic creatures to sea life, plants, and animals, inspired the artists of his day.

 

One of the Art Nouveau artists who drew upon Haeckel’s illustrations was Hermann Obrist, with whom Laban studied in Munich.  Originally trained as a botanist, Obrist the artist moved progressively from realistic depiction of natural forms to increasingly abstract and geometrical designs.  Laban’s own geometricizing of the biomorphic curves of human movement in Choreutics  follows a similar trajectory.

 

Led by the Art Nouveau movement, early 20th century artists were looking beyond the surface appearance of visual objects to reveal underlying patterns and organizing principles.  With the advent of the atomic age, scientists were doing the same.  Thus when Laban, the artist, turned his eyes to dance and human movement, he, too, was seeing double.

 

 

 

On Choreography

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Untitled design (10)In the preface to Choreutics, Laban defines “choreography” as the “designing or writing of circles.”  While we use the word today to designate composing dances, Laban was obviously familiar with the origins of the term, which come from two Greek words – khoros  and graphein.

Khoros refers both to the Greek chorus and to the circular space in which they danced, while graphein obviously means to write.  Laban extends the “writing of circles” to mean notating dance and movement and uses this as a way to mention his own system of dance notation.

Choreography has another meaning for Laban.  In a slightly modified form, Choreographie is the title of an earlier book, published in German in 1926.  As Vera Maletic notes, “A well-informed translation and annotation of this book is long overdue.”  This is because this work presents key aspects of what has come to be known as Choreutics and Space Harmony.  In fact, Maletic believes that Choreographie was the first outline of Choreutics, which can be taken as its second volume.”

The English reading public must wait for a well-informed translation of Choreographie.  But we have the second volume.  Join me in decoding this masterwork in the upcoming Tetra seminar.  Learn more….

Dancing through Time

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Dance is often viewed as a form of self-expression.  But everyone expresses themselves through their bodily movements.  These quotidian expressions differ from dance in an important way however, for everyday expressive actions are spontaneous, un-rehearsed, un-premediated and largely unguarded.

Dance movements, on the other hand, are carefully chosen, rehearsed, and controlled.  One of the attractions of dance training is not only enhanced freedom of bodily expression, but also increased control.  Yes, dancers are control freaks.  But they are also optimists.  Dance offers the possibility to construct a new self – one that is leaner, stronger, more capable, more sexy — in short, more of whatever attribute a particular style of dance may emphasize.

As an aging person who has danced, I continue to exercise, in part out of a sense of duty.  But beyond mere physical maintenance, my moving and dancing is meant to lead to a renaissance, to a newer and better me.  Paradoxically, while I am concentrating on my physical actions in the present moment, I am simultaneously connected to the past.  I have practiced these movements many times and their repetition triggers a certain nostalgia for the person I once was.

Sentient moving creates an alchemy of time, in which the present action is projected towards a hopeful future and at the same time embedded in a remembered way of being in the world.  When I move I am, I invent, and I recollect.  When I dance, I transcend the limits of past, present, and future.

On Space and Time

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Dance is an art that exists in both space and time.  In 2016, MoveScape Center will be offering a series of workshops about space, focusing on Rudolf Laban’s Choreutic theories.  As 2015 draws to an end, however, I want to focus on time.

Space is multi-dimensional. Time, on the other hand, is uni-directional.  It flows in one irreversible direction — from past to present to future.

In reality, we exist only in the present moment.  The past is gone; the future may never come.  Yet, paradoxically, we carry the past in our bodies and minds as we simultaneously project ourselves into an anticipated future.

We have no sensory mechanism for perceiving time.  And yet we are aware of time as a phenomenon closely related to movement.  On some uncanny occasions, time appears to stand still.  But mostly time seems to move like a dancer – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

“Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point,” observed Marcia Siegel.  “At the moment of its creation it is gone.”  And yet, as Rudolf Laban wrote, “Each bodily movement is embedded in a chain of infinite happenings from which we distinguish only the immediate preceding steps and, occasionally, those which immediately follow.”  In every bodily action, “both infinity and eternity are hidden.”