Inside Movement Knowledge

In addition to the upcoming COVER#2 festival (22-27 March 2010 in Amsterdam) two other major European events this spring focus on artistic responses to the issue of dance reconstruction.

1)
From 2 through 13 February 2010, the Kaaitheater in Brussels organised Re:Move, exploring dance repertoire: “Dance is essentially a transient art form because it is hard to note down. In our Re:Move festival we are presenting performers who make transmitting or reconstructing dance the subject of their production. (…) In each case, the starting point is the here and now – the artist’s own methods – rather than performing an ‘historical’ reconstruction.” The festival included the Re:Move Colloquium on 12 February: “How can dance be reconstructed? Is it desirable? Can or should one update dance material or use it in a new context? These are some of the many questions asked at this colloquium.”

2)
At the 2nd Biennial Dance Instruction Workshop/Dance Plan Germany scheduled from 1 to 7 March 2010 at the Folkwang University Essen, students from all dance colleges in Germany will devote seven days to the subject of artistic reconstruction in dance. “Not long ago the history of modern, contemporary dance could only be found in books and dance archives. The great works disappeared in the mists of time as the main interest of artists lay in working in the here and now. However, choreographers are these days becoming more interested in the reconstruction and maintenance of choreographies in the repertoire of their own and other companies.”

In a different but related vein, the following project looks at the potential of developing software that can access “historic static sources and to translate their referentiality into visuality, thus revealing its motoric and kinetic aspects. The new computer application will aid research in reconstructing dance by creating animated movement sequences. It will allow to transfer movement content from a variety of sources into a visual, three-dimensional representation. The researcher will be given a great amount of flexibility, offering a wide range of possibilities and choices to connect visualized body postures to movement phrases.” The project Visualizing (the Derra de Moroda) Dance Archives started in October 2008 and is currently planned for a period of three years. It is conducted by the dance department of Salzburg University with technical support from the department for computer sciences. Head of the project is Prof. Dr. Claudia Jeschke. The software development is lead by Dr. Henner Drewes.

If you know of other related events and projects — we invite you to add them here in comments.

The third issue of the ARTI Journal RTRSRCH will be devoted to the topic of [NOTATION]. ARTI (Artistic Research, Theory and Innovation) is a research group at the Amsterdam School of the Arts actively engaged in practice-based research processes and chaired by Marijke Hoogenboom, professor of Art Practice & Development and Henk Borgdorff, professor of Art Theory & Research. The issue will feature several contributions from Inside Movement Knowledge as well as material from other ARTI group members. The full contents list will be posted here later. This post is to speculate on the title [NOTATION] which is in brackets on purpose to indicate a freedom from context. Most domains have some form of notation that is useful for recoverable gestures, recording for future transactions, problem-solving and communicative shared action. Notations have properties that afford this range of use-functions. But if notations are a type of information artefact, other artefacts have similar properties: models, documents, classification systems, indexes, diagrams and graphs. So, this issue of the ARTI journal is not singularly concerned with notation as it might be used in the context of, e.g. dance, music, mathematics, morse code or programming languages. [NOTATION] resists the idea that there needs to be a comprehensive ‘system’ for notation to function as such; notations may even support interoperabiliity between systems.

(Some inspiration for these ideas comes from the cognitive sciences and in particular the work of Thomas Green and Alan Blackwell on the cognitive dimensions of notation systems; but also from Nelson Goodman’s seminal Languages of Art).