March 10, 2008

What Do We Ask of Viewers of Our Online Dance Videos?

In his Magnesium video blog on Great Dance, Matt Gough has a post "Ecdysis" that explores a movement score created by Nancy Garcia.

Here's Matt's video that he shot with the built-in camera on his Mac. The soundtrack is "First Brain" by Kaki King (iTunes link):

I didn't really follow Matt's advice and watch his video before understanding the context of his creative approach. I first listened to Nancy's movement score so I could learn about the source of Matt's improvisation.

In the creative/improvisational dance world, we don't really see much of this type of online collaboration taking place. I can't think of another example where a dancer posted an idea, in this case a movement score, and another dancer created a dance video based on the idea. Why does this not happen more?

For me the experience of watching Matt dance in response to the "feel the top of your head opening" score was a richer, more meaningful experience than watching him dance without knowing what the experiment was based upon. The viewer experience for me was also less passive than online video watching usually is. Essentially, almost all dance videos are posted without any guidance or suggestions for how one might experience the digital dance performance.

Matt's video leads me to two questions:

1) What do you want from viewers who watch your dance videos? And,

2) What background and context can you provide viewers so that they can experience your dance videos in a manner that you believe to be optimal?

Trackback Pings

1 Comments