Space+Dance+Digital (S+D2) is a dance project creating choreography accessed through the immersive digital platform of Augmented Reality (AR). AR allows the dance performance to be experienced, shared, and responded to through people digitally coming together across geographic, political, language, and social barriers.
Currently, I am collaborating with DreaMR to work with different organisations to present the AR Choreography in new settings, such as working with a children’s hospital, to create a version of this performance choreography for children to access while in the hospital. We are working in collaboration with Invincikids, who work globally to bring XR technology to transform healthcare. This means the choreography of S+D2 is touring as a digital dance experience, offered through the organisations Invincikids serves.
Short film about the making of the first S+D2 choreographies.
Funding support for this project includes the below, thank you:
The National Endowment for the Arts (2023/24)
The Greater Denton Arts Council (2023)
The Ivor Guest Research Grant, Society for Dance Research (2022)
Background
Space+Dance+Digital (S+D2) is a dance project creating choreography accessed through the immersive digital platform of Augmented Reality (AR). AR allows the dance performance to be experienced, shared, and responded to through people digitally coming together across geographic, political, language, and social barriers.
This builds on inquiry explored in collaboration with Gonzalo Preciado-Azanza. The preliminary investigatory stage of developing the performance choreography was undertaken in 2020 – 22 during my artistic residency at MIT. See guest lecture: Immersed in Contemporary Dance – a guest lecture given at the Immersion Lab in Sept. 2022. Immersed in Contemporary Dance also Immersed calendar and about event
In 2023/24 the project received National Endowment for the Arts funding to support the premiere of the AR interactive performance-events along with research partnering with audiences to capture feedback aimed at development of the artistic experience of the choreography. These interactive performances involve people in different geographic locations watching and responding to dance-choreography together in real-time. The projected linked young people in Detroit, Boston, and Denton.
On-going work is being done in collaboration with DreaMR
Development company. This research has previously been supported by funding from Society for Dance Research, National Endowment for the Arts, and Texas Woman’s University.
Research Questions:
What does it mean artistically for dance to take advantage of the physical boundary crossing of digital space?
Inovation in Motion Capture
The AR choreography does not show the body ‘type’ of the audience members or the dancer. I have devised a method of capture that focuses on the movements made by the dancers and audience member (if they choose to join in the dance). The motion capture method supports the dance experience being of the movement made by the dancer and each audience member within the context of the interactive performance. This means people can dance together without racial, social, and gendered informed categorizations being at the forefront in their visual experience. The performance experience is simply a movement response to each other inside the AR platform. The choreography exists in, through and beyond the dancers’ bodies and in the sensing experience of the physicality of the audience member. This highlights how we can use the choreography of space, dance and the digital to create a shared experience for people across different geographic locations and circumstances. For me this project is about the urgency of finding ways of being together that the arts can offer within the context of the divides of our digital age.
Film 1: Early stages of development (Early example of viewing and moving with choreography)
This is an example of some choreography of Adesola dancing viewed through AR equipment. The dance can be engaged with anywhere using the AR glasses.
The choreography is captured as white and yellow dots. This choreography capture has not been created into a finished work, which would code the dots into trails and colors (not just dots). In this example you can also see how the AR user’s hands (and the circle dots that correspond to their hands) can move with the choreography. These would also eventually be trails with color. See Film 3 for example of trails and color.
[1.21 mins]
Film 2: Example of movement capture
markers on points on the dancer’s body allow for the development of trails that capture where movement has been. They capture the ‘doing’ of the choreography (motion capture).
[0.29 mins]
Film 3: Example of a choreography with trails and color coded (experimental film)
Example is of a dance experience developing the trails marking movement. This is pre-AR, the choreography is not yet put into the AR format.
Concept, choreography, danced – Adesola Akinleye
Animator – Talis Reks
Data Analysis – Praneeth Namburi
Sound: written description of movement – Adesola Akinleye (text from Navigation: scoring the momentpublished by Theatrum Mundi 2022)
Music and voice – Brittany Padilla.
Poem – Adesola Akinleye (Brittany is singing a poem I wrote that inspired the choreography. The poem was written after observing a ball caught in a small stream by a city street.)
[2.21 mins]