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"Generating Dance. A history of dance and the computer" (2023)
by Olivier Zeitoun

Second occurrence of a research initiated in 2018, on the occasion of the exhibition "Coding the World", at the Centre Pompidou Paris (curator: F. Migayrou), and published in the essay "(de)coding the dance" of the catalog of the exhibition, “Generating dance. A history of dance and the computer" attempts to retrace a non-exhaustive history of generative dance on computer, from the first experiments in the 1960's, until contemporary generative creations. Echoing the work of Pierre Godard and Liz Santoro (Le principe d'incertitude), Contrepoints, and hosted on its website, the virtual and online component of the work, this state of art questions a possible history of interactive and generative systems in the context of dance.

During the 20th century, experiments and innovations initiated by choreographers and scientists in dance notation - a system of symbolic writing of movements - progressively relied on the use of digital interfaces. The computer, initially thought of as a tool for notation, movement analysis and choreographic conception, quickly concentrated the stakes of a creative exploration reconfiguring choreographic thought.

As early as the 1960s, the first research by artists and engineers was born in the United States. The computer offers new possibilities of choreographic notation but also of random generation of gestures. In 1964, the dancer Jeanne H. Beaman, with the programmer Paul Le Vasseur, then programmer Dale Isner, developed at the University of Pittsburgh Random Dances from the first choreography program capable of composing dance sequences to be interpreted. These are generated randomly by combining different series of movement types, rhythmic variations and spatial directions. One year later, A. Michael Noll initiated his collaboration with Bell Telephone Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA). Inspired by the emerging technology of computer graphics, he developed Computer-Generated Ballet, an animated film featuring a choreography of six randomly generated virtual stick figures.. In his article "Choreography and Computers" published in January 19671, Noll was the first to anticipate the digital recording of dance movements2 and their use in a software program designed as an interactive catalog. He proposes the idea of modeling movements in 3D and manipulating them from a spatial rather than a combinatorial point of view, in order to devise new sequences that can be memorized, edited and worked on under the direction of a choreographer.

At the same time, the seminal performance series 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in New York inaugurated an unprecedented relationship between artists, choreographers and engineers, which cemented the field’s use of interactivity, programming, and random processes, henceforth closely linked3. During this event, Yvonne Rainer presents Carriage Discreteness, where dancers interact with lighting, projection, and automated mechanical elements. With Physical Things, Steve Paxton questions textile matter through a gigantic inflatable polyethylene structure in which spectators are invited to move around, equipped with a small pocket radio to pick up the waves of a soundtrack composed by Robert Ashley.

Since the 1970s, choreographers have been using digital technologies in the service of a new dynamic understanding of the dancing body. In France, the choreographer Jean Babilée creates with the composer Pierre Barbaud a computer-generated ballet, Le temps partagé, broadcast on French television in 1971. Babilée declares himself close to the aesthetics of Vera Molnár, a painter whose work is based on computational methods involving chance and algorithms. In Brazil, Analivia Cordeiro also broadcasts on national television, from São Paulo*, her "computer dances" between 1973 and 1976 - M3x3, 0° - 45°, version I and II, Gestures and Cambiantes - whose "rules" are programmed by computer. The computer generates instructions for the camera as well as random step sequences for the dancers4. In 1978, eager to submit the "theatrical performance" to computer composition, John Lansdown, an Lansdown, an architect by training and founder of the Computer Arts Society in 1974, develops, beginning in 1968, in London, computer scores for a series of events before turning to choreography5. Lansdown achieves an immediate visual simplification of the human figure, as suggested by Merce Cunningham as early as 1968, to create key images of positioning, allowing the dancers to propose the intermediate, linking movements.

In 1976, the research of Zella Wolofsky, then a student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, laid the groundwork for the future development of the computer program LifeForms (1989), developed with engineer and computer scientist Tom W. Calvert, and later artist and researcher Thecla Schiphorst and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Derived from an earlier software environment, COMPOSE, this program will allow for the composition of dance scores on screen using 3D animated body models. More than a notation system, this interactive interface is imagined as a creative tool for choreographers allowing a three-dimensional observation of the movement through three interactive windows6. Thus appearing in the work of Cunningham a new type of gestures that he thought himself impossible7. At the end of the 1990s, in collaboration with Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, Cunningham uses the processes of motion capture to create BIPED (1999) which juxtaposes the bodies of the dancers with their virtual silhouettes. At the beginning of the 1980s, the video dance piece broadcast by the BBC, Catherine Wheel, by the American artist Rebecca Allen created with the dancer, choreographer and writer, Twyla Tharp, was already among the first and most complex examples of computer-generated human movement in 3D computer-generated human movement, using keyframes that allow for the calculation of continuous movement.

In 2005, the piece How long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume... by choreographer Trisha Brown with OpenEndedGroup (Marc Downie, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar) will synthesize several decades of research. A complex system of analysis of the dancers' onstage gestures generates graphs and diagrams that are projected onto a transparent screen at the front of the stage. These images, which react in real time to the dancers, can illustrate, interpret or provide a counterpoint to the movements. OpenEndedGroup speak of "thinking images" as the piece leads to autonomous, real-time composition during during a performance.

Through the development of movement capture tools, always at the initiative of university laboratories, engineers and choreographers themselves, the interaction with the virtual sphere will open up a new generativity of dance. Troika Ranch was one of the first companies to develop its own hardware and software systems as early as 1994, while the development of EyesWeb in 1997 at the University of Genoa opened the door to the creation of interactive sound environments through the recognition of precise gestures, in a live dialogue on stage with the dancers. In 1998, choreographer Michael Klien and programmer Nick Rothwell developed the software ChoreoGraph and their piece Solo One. At the heart of ChoreoGraph is the concept of a "non-linear" choreography that does not rely on the convention of a fixed temporal structure, but is open to rearrangements. In France, the choreographer Myriam Gourfink began her digital research with LOL – "Laban on Lisp" (1999 - 2001), a choreographic composition environment developed in Macintosh Common Lisp with Fred Voisin, Laurent Marthouret and Kasper Toeplitz. At the turn of the year 2000, researcher Scott deLahunta published a seminal theoretical article, "Software for Dancers" (2001), and organized a major workshop in London involving a multidisciplinary group of choreographers, digital media artists, and programmers. In 2007, Double Skin/Double Mind, developed at IRCAM by Bertha Bermudez, Chris Ziegler, Frederic Bevilacqua and Sarah Fdili Alaoui, proposes an interactive installation, where choreographer Emio Greco explains and interprets his choreographic movements, which the spectator can learn and reproduce live. At the end of the 2000s, the contents of a digital writing of dance develop online, in particular with Synchronous Objects, an online multimedia digital score which reveals the organizational principles of a choreography of William Forsythe. A year later, the Motion Bank research project was initiated by the Forsythe Company, focusing on the creation of online digital scores with invited choreographers. In parallel, the practices of hacking and collective creation are redefining the status of the choreographic author, while the Choreographic Coding Lab (CCL), is born in 2015 as a traveling laboratory on choreography generated with code.

It was in the mid-2000s that the possibility of radical conceptual changes emerged through the use of generative tools. Generative algorithms transform the challenges of digital dance notation and movement capture, and allow us to go beyond the static dimension of choreographic software that often took the form of "sketchbooks" 8. The use of virtual dancers opens the possibility of an autonomous algorithmic choreography, which also questions its limits: can the avatar be really autonomous or would it only be "an extension of the dancer or of the AI researcher"9. In any case, the incursion of Artificial Intelligence transforms the relationship between interactivity and generativity. Statistical analysis of human movements form the basis of a system that can learn, extend and create new movement sequences. The tool can then be embodied in the form of an improvising avatar, present in the studio as a virtual dance partner -- from Choreographic Language Agent (2009-2013), whose genesis can be traced back to an interdisciplinary collaborative project involving choreographer Wayne McGregor and Scott deLahunta in 2004, to Becomings, later imagined as a real body, and developed by Wayne McGregor, Marc Downie and Nick Rothwell to elaborate a real kinesthetic relationship with an autonomous choreographic agent, an additional virtual dancer in the studio, through artificial intelligence algorithms. 2019, Google publishes The Living Archive, an interactive atlas of half a million movements from the choreographer's repertoire.

From Rhizomatiks Research to choreographer Louise Crnkovic-Friis, the question of style becomes the central node of a transformation of contemporary creation and its possibilities. With the engineer Luka Crnkovic-Friis, the research of Louise Crnkovic-Friis aims to generate choreographic material with its own style, which takes shape in Chor-rnn, a deep learning software. A year later, Rhizomatiks Research's Discrete Figures, in collaboration with artist Kyle McDonald and the Elevenplay troupe, uses AI dancer, a neural network that generates a dancing humanoid form from the motion capture of real dancers improvising. The LuminAI installation paves the way for fully virtual and responsive environments, where movement improvisation is collaboratively woven with an AI-based virtual dance partner.

Digital writing and its three-dimensional model have gradually introduced the potential of a virtual dancer. The augmented space, likely to go beyond the geometrical domain, is called to transform the transmission and the experimentation of the dance in a more fluid interaction between the human brain and the movement generated by the means of technological creations. They put into question bodily boundaries and spatial realities, giving life not only to a new understanding of movement but also to new forms of choreographic creation.

Footnotes

  1. A. Michal Noll, « Choreography and Computers », Dance Magazine, vol. 41, No. 1, January 1967, pp. 43-45. ↩

  2. Tom Calvert, Wilke Lars Wilke, Rhonda Ryman et Ilene Fox, « Applications of computers to dance », IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 25, No. 2, March 2005, pp. 6 – 12. ↩

  3. Clarisse Bardiot, Les Théâtres virtuels, thèse de doctorat, Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle/CNRS, 2005. ↩

  4. Analivia Cordeiro, « The programming Choreographer », Computer Graphics & Art, vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977, pp. 27-31. ↩

  5. Douglas Eacho, « Scripting Control: Computer Choreography and Neoliberal Performance » in Theatre Journal, vol. 73 no. 3, 2021, p. 339-357. Project MUSE ↩

  6. Thecla Schiphorst, A case study of Merce Cunningham's use of the Lifeforms computer choreographic system in the making of Trackers, thèse de l'université Simon Fraser, Burnaby, Canada, March 1993, p. 36. ↩

  7. « Ce qui m'intéressait le plus, dès le début, ce n'était pas la mémoire - ce n'était pas simplement la notation (...) Je regarde certaines choses et je dis: «Eh bien, c'est impossible pour un danseur». » Greskovic citant M. Cunningham, « Dancing with a Mouse », Los Angeles Time, 5 May 1991 [En ligne], https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-05-05-ca-2103-story.html, [consulted December 9 2022]. ↩

  8. M. Gough, Towards Computer Generated Choreography: Epikinetic Composition, Hothaus seminar, Birmingham: Vivid, 2005 ↩

  9. Alexander Berman and Valencia James, Kinetic imaginations: exploring the possibilities of combining AI and dance, 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'15), AAAI Press, 2015 ↩