I recently met with Jen McLachlan from Random Dance – Wayne McGregor’s dance company based at Sadler’s Wells, known for their cutting edge dance performances, pioneering use of technology and collaborations with a wide range of creative practitioners, especially visual artists. We talked about my plan to work with a choreographer, and how this might be best realised – Jen has lots of experience of cross-discipline collaborations and was very helpful in highlighting the potential benefits and problems of such working practices. Virtually all of my previous projects have been self-initiated, self funded and self realised, so this conversation was extremely helpful.

As well as this, Jen brought to my attention some previous projects which have combined dance and motion capture technology to produce moving image works. The most interesting of these for me is the collaboration between OpenEndedGroup and Merce Cunningham resulting in Loops, an ‘abstract digital portrait’ of the dancer and choreographer. The original piece, which was only ever performed by Cunningham himself, a few times in public, uses only his hands to create a dance of incredibly expressive depth and complexity. Since it had never been recorded in notation or film/video, in 2001 OpenEndedGroup worked with Cunningham to record four variations of Loops in a motion capture studio. The resulting work is a real-time digital performance, taking the motion capture data and generating a visual work which is different every time it’s performed, as a human dance would be. Here’s an excerpt:

The great thing about this project is that OpenEndedGroup have made all the source material free to download and use in any way, under a Creative Commons non-commercial license. This includes video footage of Cunningham in the studio and the resulting motion capture data. As they say, “Cunningham’s choreography of Loops will be opened up completely. Not only will you be able to watch parallel videos of his performance shot from multiple cameras, but you will also be able to study the digital motion-capture files directly – giving you the unparalleled ability to examine Cunningham’s motion from any angle and from any distance, to speed up or slow down playback to any rate, to measure joint angles and their correlations, and even to perform sophisticated statistical analysis of the movement… Our open source license allows future (and even contemporaneous) programmers to update the work as well as to create their own derivative artworks – they can forge creative reinterpretations of it in a fashion that will go far beyond the present-day practice of “remixes,” which operate only on the surface rather than on the structure of the original work. Thus we are truly entrusting the future preservation and perpetuation of Loops to unforseen hands.”

I love this open-source file sharing approach to the work – it really expands the potential of the original idea and, as they say in the quote above, extends the longevity of the project. I’d very much like to reach a similar level of artistic generosity with my own project.  I’ve downloaded all the source material and look forward to making something with it. Although it’s a bit daunting, having access to this raw material of such artistry and thus the opportunity to alter it (for better or worse!), it’s also incredibly exciting and I look forward to sharing the results here.