10 Ways to Engage Internet Audiences with Your Dance-Making
There are many creative, fun and participatory approaches that dancers can take to engaging online audiences with their dancing, choreography and teaching.
Here are a number of ideas that I encourage dancers to explore and build upon. Please share similar projects. I'm very interested to know how dancers are connecting with their Internet audiences. What new avenues and possibilities are you considering?
Ideas and examples to consider for your own explorations:
1) Dance Mashups: Post video and music excerpts of your performances. Encourage your audience on YouTube and Vimeo to create video remixes of your work and add their own footage as well. See Martha Graham's Clytemnestra Project:
2) Make Me a Dance: Encourage your Twitter followers to tweet a description of a dance they would like to see. Pick your favorite dance tweet every day or every week and create a 12 second dance with your webcam.
3) Interactive Performance Technology Explorations: Many dancers are experimenting with real-time graphics and animation. Set-up a lab in the studio before a performance and allow participants/audience members to experiment and create their own dances. Post videos of audience members using these tools (with permission, of course). See eMotion and Animata.
4) Seek Thematic User Generated Content: Encourage your audience to submit content in text, picture, audio and video formats that will be incorporated directly into your performance. See Off-Broadway show My First Time and somewhat related to this idea Wikipedia Loves Art.
5) Dance Contests: Develop your own dance and choreography contests where participants create and upload dance videos following guidelines that you create for your competition. See Ballet Nouveau Colorado's Dancemakers 2.0 and battles on Dance Jam. A Ballet Nouveau Colorado video submission (See YouTube Channel):
6) Get Everybody Texting: Use Twitter, texting and chat to get your live and online audiences talking about your performances. See "Live Tweeting at the Theater" at Portland Center Stage and see SCREENtxt, a museum example from the Mattress Factory.
8) Fusing Master Classes with Online Instruction: First, create videos that demonstrate your technique to beginning and intermediate dance students. Second, integrate this online content with in-person master classes for amateur dancers. See my January 2008 post "Rethinking Master Classes" to Engage Larger Dance Audiences."
9) Dance-Focused Alternative Reality Game: Create an ARG, a participatory, story-telling narrative that fuses online clues with real-world adventures. Make dancing and improvisation part of the adventure. See "Top Secret Dance-Off."
10) Create Community and Topic-Specific Dance-Making: Help communities, in broadest sense, create dances based on their interests and passions. Watch videos of science students who created dances to represent their areas of study:
There are many possibilities. Please let me know what you create.
Here's a quote from the below video in which Rubin provides excellent introduction to his rave-inspired hand dance actualization machine:
In building this object I used as my theoretical foundation a practice called "glowsticking" that exists predominantly in rave and underground electronic music culture. Glowstickers, at least the talented ones, have cultivated the unique ability to twirl their glowsticks in mid-air and actually generate continuous, dynamic, 3D imagery in space. This is then observed by other party-goers whom might be near them. It usually happens spontaneously on the dance floor as opposed to being strictly a performance activity.
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance at Alvin Ailey Next Week
In 2006, I wrote a multimedia guide to modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller and interviewed Jody Sperling about her choreography that reimagines these colorful, and, for the era, hi-tech performances.
I think that the simple beauty, repetitive movement, colorful scenery, diverse cultures, captivating music and highly participatory nature of the dance offers great food for thought.
It all leads me to one question: How come the Internet is rarely used to share the sheer fun of dancing?
I especially enjoyed the opening of the above interview during which Stewart discusses how the sounds of the biological process informed "Magnification." I'm paraphrasing a bit:
It's about turning the body inside out through the amplification of the sounds of the biological processes of the body. The blood circulating, nerves synapsing,
bones and ligaments creaking and crunching as they take the weight of body. Also, it's an interesting moment when the body breaks down or is under stress, that's when we notice our bodies the most...The invisible becomes visible through technology, especially electron-microscopes which have allowed Twentieth Century medicine to understand the intimate secrets of how the body functions.
Here are video highlights from ADT's "Devolution," which features dancers and robots performing on stage together (my 2007 post):
Held
"Held" was a collaboration between Garry Stewart and famous dance photographer Lois Greenfield (my 2007 post). Here's a brief clip, which gives you a flavor of this piece:
I'm excited about seeing this program, which was inspired by Brian Greene's popular book "The Elegant Universe." This performance combines two of my passions: dance and science. And I'm very interested in seeing how Karole Armitage and her dancers synthesize quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity.
Each program (Friday, May 30th and Saturday, May 31st) consists of a performance followed by a discussion featuring Armitage, composer Lukas Ligeti and physicist Jim Gates (May 30th) and Brian Greene (May 31st).
Background Videos for Armitage Program
Brian Greene gives a presentation about superstring theory at TED:
James Gates in an interview about Super Symmetry on PBS:
There are no dance videos of this upcoming performance, but you can watch a handful of profiles of dancers from Armitage Gone! Dance on their YouTube channel including this one of Mei-Hua.
Dancers have a highly developed ability to see and replicate dance moves. This skill is based on muscle memory and dancers, over time, learn to master extended dance pieces after just one or a few viewings.
One of the world's finest dancers, whose powerhouse technique and dramatic intensity propelled him from his native Spain to American Ballet Theater when he was still a teenager, Mr. Corella also has a rare, less visible gift: he is able to reproduce a dance simply by seeing it once -- not only his part, but everybody else's too. After observing Ms. [Gelsey] Kirkland [former ABT star], he was soon following behind her, humming as he mirrored her movements. Forty minutes after they began, he had the hundreds of steps down cold.
You can watch an excellent profile about Angel Corella, although it does not relate directly to muscle memory -- click this screen shot to be taken to YouTube:
Solway then explains the neuroscience of muscle memory:
Where initially dancers see one move and then another, eventually they merge the steps into phrases and then into longer sequences. Brain scientists refer to this process as "chunking." Dr. [Daniel] Glaser likens it to learning to tie a shoelace. First you think "left over right, right under left," and then you make a bow. But once you've learned the steps, they become one seamless movement.
"What dancers are able to do, which you and I cannot," he said, "is to take a set of those moves and turn that into one long phrase and then take a dozen of those phrases and put them into one long movement."
Dance is a language. Once you learn the language, you can begin to predict what steps could come next based on combinations that have become familiar to you. This is obviously very useful when it comes to ballet, where when someone says "tombé pas de bourrée glissade assemblé" you aren't thinking of each individual step on its own, because it's a recognized sequence in your ballet vocabulary. For the most part, in classical dance, there are only so many steps that can physically link to other steps based on where your body, your weight, and your momentum are at that moment. The fact that you can predict, to some extent, a handful of next possible steps, greatly cuts the amount of time it takes to learn a full sequence of steps.
The ability of dancers to remember patterns of movement always impresses me. It took about a year and a half to two years of modern dance and jazz classes before my body would start to remember dance routines taught by instructors during class. It's a very gratifying feeling to have your body magically remember a routine you have seen for the first time and then go onto the dance floor and do it. (I started dancing in my 40s and have been dancing for a few years).
