March 17, 2006

Projects for Dance and Technology Students

It's been nice to receive more emails lately from students at colleges and universities who are pursuing studies in dance and technology or are taking a class or writing a paper that relates in some way to the fusing of dance and digital tools. I'm happy to help answer questions, if I can, or forward your messages to others who can answer your questions or give you suggestions.

I was thinking that there are a number of projects students could work on that would be both worthwhile research endeavors and wonderful ways for dancers around the world to learn about the latest developments in interactive performances, new media tools and related technologies.

I would be delighted if you were working on any of the following projects (or related one) and could make your final research public for others to access:

- Annotated picture guides of interactive performance tools and technologies: Let's say that you are taking a class or doing research on motion tracking options for dance performances. What I think would be great is if you take pictures at every step of the process so that people who view your project could have a solid understanding of how motion tracking worked. You could take pictures of your camcorder, dancers, software screen shots and other elements and upload these pictures to a photo gallery such as Flickr. Then you could add annotations to each of your pictures so that viewers would understand every part of the process. I'd be delighted to link to these pictures or pull them into my blog for people to access.

- Annotated video guides to interactive performances: In this case, I have the same idea in mind as above except that now you would work with video. You could take video to show how motion caption systems (or other technologies) are set-up and then used to capture the movement of a dancer. Then, you could edit this video and add a voice over that describes specifically what is happening. Finally, you could upload this video to You Tube, Google Videos or other free video hosting services.

- Documenting dance performances: You can, of course, take videos and pictures of works in progress and final dance performances that you're working on. Then you can upload these videos to the web. One of the things that I haven't seen that I think would be very worthwhile would be if you upload two versions of each video. With the first video of a rehearsal or dance performance, you upload it with the musical track. With the 2 version you create an audio track where you and other dancers/choreographers explain what your performance is about - essentially this is like the second audio track on a DVD where you listen to actors and directors discuss a movie.

- Performance blogs with videos: I'd love to see more experimentation with weblogs where the choreographers and dancers start posting to their blogs from the day of the first rehearsal through the actual performance. I enjoy getting inside the creative process and understanding how a dance work is developed from the initial idea to the final result - your performance. So at every practice, you can take video clips and post them to your blog. These videos would let your readers follow your progress and also provide a forum where visitors who watch your videos can offer you feedback.

Those are my thoughts for now. I'm sure there are many other possibilities.

Please let me know if you are going to pursue any of the above projects or other ideas you have for sharing your experimentations, research and performances with an online audience.

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