Observations
| Perhaps one of the hardest things for dancers to get used to when working with this technology is the feeling of control that they are suddenly empowered with since it is a aberration from the traditional relationship of music and dance. To quote one of the dancers from e-Motion, it might very well be "too much control". The default role of music in dance is to drive the dancers along or to fill a void left by the starkness of movement without words. It may seem discomforting then to have the music suddenly change from a static monolith to a malleable mirror. But it is precisely this ambiguity between having control and being surprised by the unexpected, which creates the opportunity for an authentic interactive performance. Both the dancer and the system become equal partners in this exchange with the dancers seeking to achieve greater accuracy in musical results by acquiring mechanical precision; and the composer, working vicariously through the system, seeking to undermine the regularity of the music with engineered humanist spontaneity. Like a new environment, an interactive music performance space will seem strange and exotic to the dancer when they first enter it. In a sense, the music will "play them" for as long as it takes them to understand the result of their movement before its execution. Eventually though, their command of the environment is complete and the scale has been tipped in the other direction. The moment of true interaction is the ephemeral state of equilibrium that happens in between. | |