January 4, 2009

Visualizing Movement with William Forsythe's Improvisation Technologies

One of my favorite dance videos is William Forsythe's "Solo" (1995). I've always liked the fast-paced, unexpected movement patterns and was curious how he performed this piece:

Well, on his 1999 "Improvisation Technologies" CD-ROM, Forsythe provides a hands-on guide to the approach he uses to create different types of movements. His methodology is grounded in using geometric shapes such as points, lines and three-dimensional forms to help dancers develop their own improvisational practice. And each of the video explanations includes overlain animated graphics to help dancers visualize each example.

Here are two video examples that provide a glimpse into Forsythe's methodology. The first video illustrates how to create arm movements by extruding lines from points:

And this clip shows a visualization of creating curves and circles:

(By the way, much thanks to The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. They are always very helpful. Improvisation Technologies happens to use an old version of QuickTime. So the folks in the third-floor research library didn't stop until they found a computer that could run the CD-ROM.)

Origins of Improvisation Technologies

In an interview, "Dance Geometry," with William Forsythe in 1999, digital artist Paul Kaiser explains the origins of "Improvisation Technologies":

I first met William Forsythe in his kitchen in Frankfurt in 1994. The first thing Bill did was to try to explain how he goes about creating new movements. He started drawing imaginary shapes in the air, and then running his limbs through this complicated and invisible geometry. As a non-dancer, I was completely lost.

Later that year, I suggested that he use computer animation superimposed on videos of himself explaining them to make this geometry visible. Together with

href="http://www.movingimages.de/">Chris Ziegler and Volker Kuchelmeister at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, he created a multimedia work along these lines entitled Improvisation Technologies. Since then, he's exhibited this extraordinary catalogue of dance procedures in several museums, and still uses it in training new members of his dance company.

Forsythe says in interview with Kaiser:

So I began to imagine lines in space that could be bent, or tossed, or otherwise distorted. By moving from a point to a line to a plane to a volume, I was able to visualize a geometric space composed of points that were vastly interconnected. As these points were all contained within the dancer's body, there was really no transition necessary, only a series of "foldings" and "unfoldings" that produced an infinite number of movements and positions. From these, we started making catalogues of what the body could do. And for every new piece that we choreographed, we would develop a new series of procedures.

Some choreographers create dance from emotional impulses, while others, like Balanchine, work from a strictly musical standpoint. My own dances reflect the body's experiences in space, which I try to connect through algorithms. So there's this fascinating overlap with computer programming.

For Eidos, I gave my dancers and myself the following general instruction: "Take an equation, solve it; take the result and fold it back into the equation and then solve it again. Keep doing this a million times".

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