Put together the words dance and technology, and you can almost hear the ruckus of side-taking and name-calling as a host of other rowing couplets jostle to weigh in behind them: artistic and scientific, natural and artificial, organic and mechanical, ancient and modern, feminine and masculine, east and west… A structuralist would have a field day, a semiotician would be signing up for more, a postmodern theorist would be … well, let’s not go there.
In fact, let’s not think of it as an opposition at all, because there’s nothing either unusual or new about dance stepping out with technology. Music, scenography and lighting have long used mechanics and electricity; performances are often videoed for the record. Furthermore, dance – particularly classical dance – has much in common with technological processes: it is standardised, assembled from a lexicon of component parts, made up from a variety of more-or-less defined, reproducible units. And even creativity can be talked of in terms of invention.
So let’s narrow the terms to performance. When people nowadays talk of technology in relation to dance performance, they generally mean either screened and projected images, or ‘interactive’ technology. So dances with an electronic score, or with a software-controlled lighting board, are not generally seen as experiments in ‘dance and technology’ – but they are if the music or lighting is hooked up to some other variable, such as the dancers’ steps or the audience’s input.
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Why the focus on screened images? Because sound and lighting don’t displace movement in our perceptual field, but act rather as an environment for the dance to move in. Screened images, on the other hand, are often not so much environment as competition: our eyes flicker between watching the dancers or the projections. I once went to a seminar in which we reached the happy but frankly banal consensus that dance is a multimedia mode of performance with each strand contributing to the palette – like some rainbow coalition working for the greater good. But it’s clearly more combative than that. The screen, for example, is notoriously attention-grabbing. Switch it on, and most of us will recline in our seats and relax into couch-potato mode, happy and perhaps relieved to be stimulated without expending too much effort. Dance, in my admittedly biased experience, is usually the opposite: to stimulate us, it actually requires an expenditure of effort and attention. Therein lies the danger for the choreographer: a piece of film doesn’t need to be any good to have more pulling power than the dance it shares the stage with. Better use that screen carefully then. In the recent ‘Made in England’ trilogy of performances at the Lilian Baylis Theatre, Jiva opted for an unobtrusive backdrop of abstract digitised patterns, which didn’t compete with his performance – but neither did it seem necessary to it. Mita Banerjee took a bolder step with her video projection, a time-lapsed loop of a large double bed. It certainly complemented the theme of the show (sleep), but its scale also sometimes dwarfed the often floor-hugging choreography.
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One way to stimulate the viewer into active participation rather than passive reception is to make the performance interactive, imparting an impression of immediacy, of live (or ‘real-time’, as the jargon goes) rather than pre-recorded events. The danger with this is that the focus of the performance can become skewed onto what-happens-when, rather than on why it’s happening at all. We can end up looking for, say, the movement that cuts a light-beam sensor that triggers a sound, the supreme achievement being simply a satisfied ‘ah-ha!’ on working out the mechanism, instead of taking in the effect as a whole – which is surely where the value of the performance lies. Anyone who has watched kids playing with an ‘educational’ CD-Rom can see the potential downsides: an attenuated attention span, a focus on stimulus-response mechanisms that may well increase hand-eye co-ordination but all too easily bypass the brain. The use of ‘interactive’ technologies may engage the audience as participants rather than observers, but that is not in itself ‘empowering’, as some would have it, nor does it have any bearing on the quality of the artwork, whether purportedly ‘co-authored’ or not.
In sum, I see two main problems with the dance-technology coupling in performance. First, unless used well, it can compete with and displace dance rather than complementing or enhancing it. And as dancers, choreographers or dancegoers, we should value the distinctive communicative effects and affects of the live performing body (where ‘live’ means far more than just ‘real time’). Second, technology used in dance often shifts the emphasis from product to process, giving too much weight to the whats and hows rather than the whys and wherefores of the artwork. And as any stage artist knows, whether choreographer or performer, the moment and import of performance lies ultimately in its effect, its production, rather than in its process or its preparation.
Of course, there have been some marvellous dances where the use of technology is integral and fundamental to the performance – I think immediately of Merce Cunningham’s Biped (2001), or this year’s Vivisector by Austrians Klaus Obermaier and Chris Haring, and Shobana Jeyasingh’s [h]Interland. Biped uses motion-capture animations of the dancers’ movements, projecting them onto a translucent scrim in front of the stage. They seem like spirits or astral projections, with powerful intimations of death. Freed from earthly constraints of scale and mass, the animations are contrasted with the physical presence that the dancers bring: the flesh, the weight, the sweat, the effort – the life. Vivisector is a very different work, based on the interface, rather than the contrast, between physical and virtual presence. In this piece, the video projections have been made to stay within the outlines of the dancers’ bodies, casting no shadow on the backcloth, to stunning illusory effect. There is a Star Trek style teleport in which the dancers seem to gradually dematerialise until they’re made entirely of snowy TV fuzz (‘beam me up, Scottie!’). Later, a projected video of each dancer is superimposed on the real one, so that their bodies seem to warp and smear before our very eyes. Vivisector is more than just trickery (though it is that too), and its futuristic merging of physical and virtual realities is both fascinating and unsettling.
Jeyasingh’s [h]Interland, performed at the Greenwich Dance Agency in November, was also a deliberately disorienting experience. With its action played out on different levels within the hall (the audience seated on stage, looking out), and its multiple screens including looped video footage and a live webcast from Bangalore, it generated powerfully dislocating contrasts of scale, place and time, of physical presentation and imagistic representation. If it sometimes veered towards sensory and informational overload, there was nevertheless an inescapable logic to the use of the screens and projections, transforming the place and architecture of the hall into a multi-dimensional collage, a nexus of different space-times.
Such pieces successfully foreground the technology in performance. In many other works, it is successfully left running in the background. Cunningham, of course, has used Lifeforms software as a compositional tool for many pieces; but an audience wouldn’t necessarily see that influence, nor would it be necessary to do so in order to appreciate the work. In the field of music, composers have for many years integrated electronic and computer-aided techniques into their methods of both composition and performance, to the extent that the ‘technological’ aspect is no longer a special feature in itself, but a tool to use as befits the motive. I look forward to the day when dance reaches that degree of unselfconsciousness about visual or interactive technologies – or when those technologies reach that degree of unobtrusiveness.
So none of this is to say that dance should not use technology in its processes or its products, only that dance which chooses to be in some way about its technology – a valid subject, to be sure – needs to tread carefully and thoughtfully. One of the best films about film technology is, interestingly enough, a dance film. Again, I look forward to the day when a dance about dance technology produces something as fantastically entertaining and as thoroughly engaging as that classic film: Singing in the Rain.