EMMA: New Ground

Innovation and Technology in Dance

Innovation in dance can take so many different forms: a looking outward that helps to connect our field to a greater audience base, that makes our work more relevant, more invested in the world around us which in turn will inspire the world to take a greater interest in us; a looking inward through rigorous theoretical and practical research that investigates what we are doing in relation to what we have done before, revealing new information about the body as the source and site of our art-making.
Technology will absolutely play a part in both the outward and inward investigations. As our audience becomes increasingly “connected,” their expectations of art and entertainment change. I am not advocating that we begrudgingly morph our aesthetic to compete with the high production values and wow-quotient of Hollywood. I am interested in a different kind of art - one that challenges and provokes, one that nudges an audience out of passivity. But because this kind of art depends on a dialogue between artist and audience, I am advocating that artists like myself pay attention to the cultural literacy of their audience.
What are the audience’s reference points for performance? Performance is like… TV, movies, music, books, rock concerts, video games, animation, the internet. What is the culture within which our audience is viewing our art? A technological culture. While individual innovations in the tech industry wow us for a few moments, I would argue that technology, as a whole, is more familiar than awesome in contemporary U.S. culture.
The flashes of video and the electronic sound score included in a performance are not just “tricks,” they are grounding points that refer back to our audience member’s experience of everyday life, another vehicle for information, another tool which we can use to further our concept, to clarify our images, to move our audience. For me, the real promise of technology in performance lies in its transformative properties, its ability to make one point in time and space seem like another, its ability to draw an audience so deeply into the performance that they become the performance themselves.
While I have a romantic vision of what those transformations might mean for my own work, I am daunted by the practical steps towards implementing that vision… the information, the tools, the knowledge, the facility, the budget, and the time. I know and trust my body. I recognize its limitations, and I have enough physical resources to work around them. But I don’t have any of this when it comes to technology. I recognize that our work in the last two quarters has merely scratched the tip of the iceberg of potential for technology in performance. I now have my radar up for news of artists who are employing technology interestingly in their work, and I look forward to collaborations with artists and designers who can help me realize some of my own ideas for integrating technology into my future work.

posted by Annie @ 10:32 PM