February 21, 2007

ADT and Greenfield: Photography-Enabled Participatory Dance Performances

Earlier this week I wrote about Australian Dance Theatre's (ADT) "Devolution" performance and linked to videos so you could watch robotic dancers in action.

In this post I would like to discuss ADT's new tour of "Held," which kicked off yesterday at Sadler's Wells in London. "Held," first performed in 2004, combines the very athletic dancing of ADT with the real-time photography of Lois Greenfield. (You've probably seen the dance photography of Greenfield. On her website, you'll find many of her pictures.)

In the first part of this post, I provide links to performance clips, video interviews and other resources so you can learn about this work and hear directly from Greenfield and ADT's Artistic Director Garry Stewart. Then I discuss why I find this work fascinating in terms of what it might mean for creating participatory, Internet-enabled dance pieces.

I found this 24-second video of "Held" on YouTube, which gives a good idea of the general structure of this work. In a nutshell Greenfield takes pictures of the dancers throughout the performance and her images are projected almost in real-time on two large screens on stage behind the dancers. So audience members can watch what is usually an ephemeral art form while simultaneously viewing freeze frames of the action - usually images of the dancers in flight.

Resources and Background

- The tour of "Held" started yesterday at Sadler's Wells in London. Here are the rest of the tour dates in the UK through the end of March.

- Toward the bottom of the Sadler's Wells "Held" performance page, you'll find a good, extended video of this performance.

- On WorldWideDance UK, there are three excellent video interviews with Artistic Director Stewart and photographer Greenfield - I highly recommend that you watch these videos to better understand this performance and the creative process. The video trailer on this page is the same as the one on the Saddler's Wells site, but has a smaller image size.

- On Greenfield's site, you can read a description of "Held" and watch an animated video that gives you a general flavor of this work.

- Preview article of "Held" in this week's Telegraph. I found what looks more like a posed studio shot than a real action shot included with the article interesting. Why is this the only picture that shows Greenfield taking a picture of dancers with the image projected on a large screen? In the publicity pictures on the Sandler's Wells site, you only find high-resolution pictures of dancers not an image that captures the process.

"Held" as Participatory Art

If I were in the audience, I'm wondering what I'd be thinking as Greenfield takes pictures? Would I watch the dance through her eyes and wonder what shots I would take if I had her camera? Would I sit back and marvel at the projected images and realize that my eyes have a very limited capacity to capture the real-time movements of dancers?

When I was reading articles and watching video clips about "Held", I came across a reference or two to photo pioneer Eadweard Muybridge who took a famous photo series of a moving horse to determine once and for all if a horse lifts all four legs simultaneously when galloping. The answer is "yes," but before Muybridge developed the technology to take pictures in rapid succession, it simply was not possible to answer this question. (Last year I read a good biography "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West" by Rebecca Solnit.)

Before the 1880s or so, nobody had ever seen a non-blurry stop-action photo of objects moving at high-speed. "Held" harkens back to these pioneering days of photography by giving audience members the same type of vivid freeze-frames of live action - still images that provide insight that is otherwise not knowable to the unassisted human eye.

It's not, however, the photography by itself that's intriguing, it's being able to contrast the live action with the freeze-frames. Plus, we get to watch a photographer, who usually plays the role of observer, as an integral part of the performance.

But just as photographic equipment is now used by just about everybody, how can "Held" also become more democratized? Why, in other words, is Greenfield the only one who gets to take the pictures? Is there another way to stage "Held" so that audience members don't have to just be vicarious photographers? I want to be on-stage taking shots so I can see the images I take projected on the large screens.

Or, if staging this dance performance for the emerging participatory art culture doesn't work, how can this photographer-as-performer set-up be ported to the Internet?

Here's my idea:

- Post a video of the "Held" performance to the Internet. The video quality has to be good enough so that it can be comfortably viewed in full screen mode. The video would only include the dancers and not the photographer Greenfield. The shots would be as tight as possible while still showing the full bodies of the dancers.

- Visitors would be encouraged to open-up this video clip in an online or offline video editing software program. Then, users would create 30 freeze-frames from this video performance.

- Then, users would drop their screen captures into a special template that included the video performance on one side and the screen captures on the other side. The user would determine where to insert their screen captures and how long each screen capture should be displayed.

- Finally, the video would be uploaded to a shared video library along with the split-screen videos of other users.

- Now anybody can go to this library and watch one or more of these videos.

To me, this is what "Held" is about. I'd enjoy watching the performance, the dancing and Greenfield's choice of shots - "choice" might not be the perfect word. "Held" is choreographed specifically for Greenfield. So she must have a fairly good idea of which posses she intends to capture at each point of the performance - even thought the actual images have to vary a bit from one performance to the next.

But what I'd find just as interesting is to see what freeze-frames others find intriguing. And by creating the user-generated media project I describe above, it's possible to see what hundreds of other users find captivating about the "unseen" movements of the dancers.

Maybe this online participatory project should be called "What I missed." And users are encouraged to create screen grabs of those movements that they don't think they would have seen or recorded in their mind without the aid of an augmentation device - the camera.

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