My final project will consist of a more informed discussion of the topics addressed in my show-and-tell presentation, and will focus exclusively on Merce Cunningham's work BIPED in relation to our class readings on media theory, in conjunction with other pertinent readings in the fields of dance, art history, movement, the body, and cinema. I will also look at video and quick time animation.
Introduction
Dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham's recent multimedia work BIPED (1999), constitutes a pas de deux of sorts for humans and post-humans that frustrates one of the central tenants of the dance, and perhaps even biped locomotion, its anthropocentrism. What of other hybrid forms or post-humans? BIPED literally sets the stage for some timely and provocative musings on the deployment of hypermedia and remediation as artistic strategies that further press the frontiers of avant-garde experimentation in dance. When read more broadly, the post-human figures in BIPED gesture toward the convergence of biology and cybernetics that is transforming the human body into a hybrid of flesh and mechanism.
In the field of dance and the visual arts, Cunningham's collaboration with the artist Paul Kaiser and the digital-animator Shelley Eshkar, has produced a new type of media immersion, in which the viewer's glance negotiates between the dual competing logics of the performative (the dancers, musicians, etc.) and the virtual (a digital projection, itself an amalgam of dance, drawing and cinema). [1] Throughout BIPED, the animated figures--produced through motion-capture and digital animation--are projected upon a transparent scrim in front of the stage so as to evoke a dynamic space that effectively oscillates amongst virtual space, real theatrical space, and the varying degrees of their hybridization. It is my contention that the power of the work arises in the epistemological, psychological and physical confusions it produces; the viewer is immersed in a new medium through/in which previously invisible versions of the real--human movement apart from the body—attain visibility. Thus, the work compels a reassessment of old mediums--their transmission and storage of representations of the moving body--in an uncanny process that re-members movement to the viewer's own body. The viewer must also contend with the real disappearing body, or the reality of the burgeoning of hybrid bodies outside of the theatrical.
Topic Headers
MERCE CUNNINGHAM AND THE DANCE
DANCING BODY AS MEDIUM: MOVER AND CENOTAPH
ANIMATION AND MOTION CAPTURE
HYPERMEDIA AND REMEDIATION IN BIPED
HISTORIC PRECIDENCE
PERFORMATIVE/CINEMATIC SPACE: A CONVERGENCE
SIGHT/SITE: THE VIEWER'S GLANCE
CORPOREALITY AND TRACE: RE-MEBERING THE DISSEMBODIED
CONCLUSION
Notes
[1] I will not be addressing lighting, costume, or musical composition at any length. It should be noted that the costumes were created from a hologram-like fabric that maximized the reflection of light from the dancers' bodies, echoing the colorations of the motion-capture animations projected on the scrim.
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