Hello everyone, thank you for your interest!
My name is Stephan Jürgens and I am going to present our paper "The Body Beyond Movement:
Missed Opportunities to engage with Contemporary Dance in HCI"
The paper argues that a significant paradigm change in contemporary dance can offer further
opportunities for HCI researchers interested in embodied interaction and interactive system design.
Today, performance theory and dance scholars explain contemporary dance as an artistic
field that consists of many different dance practices or genres, including…
Expressionist dance...
Modern dance...
Postmodern dance...
Contact improvisation...
Neoclassical Ballet...
Tanztheater and Physical Theatre...
Self-reflective Postmodern dance and Concept dance...
Digital Performance (or Dance and Technology)...
and Choreographic performance.
The paradigm shift in recent performance theory and the sub-field of dance studies was explained
by Klein (2015) as follows: movement is not the sole medium of expression of the dancer anymore,
and choreography is no longer understood exclusively as the organization of the movements
of human bodies in space and time.
Instead, much contemporary dance choreography can be described as a “collection and organization
of heterogeneous materials, as an intermedial arrangement of bodies, spoken language, texts,
images, light, sound and objects."
In summary, the paradigm shift describes how contemporary dance has grown into a heterogeneous
and interdisciplinary artistic field that is very different from traditional dance,
and which offers HCI researchers new and distinct opportunities for engaging.
So the main research question of this paper is: How has HCI been engaging with contemporary dance?
To answer this question we conducted a survey.
We searched the term contemporary dance in the two main online libraries,
namely ACM and IEEE.
The search returned 42 relevant papers, of which 86% were published during the last decade.
We analysed the topics and constituted seven categories for the kind of engagement
by HCI researchers with contemporary dance.
The first category ‘technical framework’, encompasses papers presenting
low-level technical contributions for developers.
Category 1.2 includes papers that focus on the collaboration with dancers in an HCI research context,
often with a user-centered design or co-design perspective.
Category 1.3 ‘theory and methodology’ contains papers that lay important theoretical
and methodological ground for the field.
The fourth category ‘support tools for dance’ comprises papers presenting hardware and
software solutions to support end users.
In category 1.5, we find papers that focus on specific ‘artistic work and processes’
at the intersection of contemporary dance and various kinds of technologies.
The last two categories ‘dance archive/ documentation’ and ‘audience studies’
were added, despite only containing a single paper each, because they represent
significant research areas.
The most recent categories are ‘research through practice’ and ‘theory and methodology’.
High percentages of total publications in these particular categories are certainly
symptomatic of the paradigm change in contemporary dance discussed above.
Next, we wanted to know "How do HCI researchers understand the term 'Contemporary Dance'?"
It is not a question that can be answered in a simple and straightforward fashion, because
none of the papers we looked at offers a tentative definition of contemporary dance.
Nor does any of the papers refer back to existing definitions in the literature of the related
scientific areas, such as dance studies or performance theory.
Hence, our method for analysis and coding was to compile a list with all descriptions
of the term ‘contemporary dance’, characteristics attributed to it and relevant contextual information.
Based on these results, we established five categories in which ‘contemporary dance’
is used to describe: a field (2.1), a genre (2.2), or a technique (2.3).
To deepen our analysis and subsequent discussion of the results, we also included references
to concrete artistic work (2.4), and references to processes and practices (2.5).
Across the 42 papers we obtained 66 results in five categories (see table 2).
Looking at Table 2 it is evident that the term ’contemporary dance’ is not used
in a homogeneous way.
For less than a third of the authors, contemporary dance is an artistic field, while over a third
of authors understand the term as a dance genre, or even narrower as a dance technique.
All usages can make sense, according to the topic the researchers are investigating, and
if identified properly.
However, we suggest that a standardized usage for HCI terminology could employ
a ‘zooming in and out’ type of logic.
"Zooming in", a HCI researcher could for instance describe the field of inquiry as 'contemporary
dance', the practice within this field as 'contact improvisation', the object of study
a set of technique classes and the focus of the research as a particular weight-sharing
exercise.
"Zooming out", a HCI researcher could for example describe the study focus, such as
looking at 'marking' (which is a memorising practice carried out by dancers), then mention
that they study this practice in rehearsals of a new ballet production in the field of
contemporary dance.
We concluded from our analysis of the use of the term ’contemporary dance’ that
we needed to conduct a thorough study.
So the third part of our research question looks into "How do the authors (of the papers
in our data set) engage with literature from dance studies and performance theory?
As a first step, we looked at all references of the 42 papers and determined, which are
related to dance studies and performance theory.
We found that out of the 896 references across the 42 papers, 156 can be related to
dance studies and performance theory.
The results show that 31% of the authors do not become involved with dance and performance
related theory at all.
Further 31% show low numbers of related references (up to 20%).
As a second step in our analysis of the related references, we examined the kind of engagement
with the dance study and performance theory literature.
To this end, we employed a method by Marshall et al. (2017), which they developed to study
the quality of citations in a large sample of all CHI 2016 papers.
Our analysis produced results that are positive on the one hand and disturbing on the other hand.
The positive conclusions are: critique citation in our data set is more than twice as much (10.3%)
compared to Marshall et al. (4.8%).
All critique citation instances appear in papers from the last decade;
and more than 80% of critique citations are very recent.
Hopefully this constitutes a growing tendency.
Nevertheless, Table 5 also shows an alarming result: 83.3% of all papers contain no critique citations
and only 16.7% contain critique citation.
In comparison, Marshall et al. found 43% papers lacking any critique citation in their data set.
Marshal et al. have alerted: "Lack of discussion and critique of previous work can encourage
the spread of misunderstandings and errors.
(...) failure to understand and discuss prior work is already leading directly to poor quality research.
A particular risk is the citation of work from other fields, where CHI’s tradition
of citing as fact comes into conflict with complex and not easily summarised ideas from other disciplines."
We have found the following types of problems, which can arise when contemporary dance related
theory and concepts are introduced and employed without proper critical discussion:
mis-interpretation of cited dance references unsupported claims and contradictions in HCI
literature regarding dance references idiosyncratic introduction of dance terms
with potential for confusion
If you are interested in concrete examples, please consult our paper for the details.
However, there are also exemplary instances of critique citation in the data set, such as:
clear theoretical contextualisation and scope critical assessment based on presented references
Coming to the final part of this presentation, we asked ourselves "What opportunities for
HCI can arise through engagement with the paradigm shift in contemporary dance and performance theory?"
There are three kinds of opportunities that we see emerging.
The first opportunity presents itself when engaging with the topic of embodied interaction
from the perspective of performance research and theory.
We propose that looking into epistemologies and theories of embodiment from the perspective
of performance theory is beneficial for HCI researchers who want to reflect critically
on HCI methodologies and production.
A second opportunity arises from the use of recent contemporary dance methods and practices
into more applied research areas within HCI, for example in the field of social robotics.
Embodied practices for roboticists, such as recently proposed by LaViers et al. (2018), benefit
from including recent contemporary dance methods and practices (for instance, choreography
as a body-based research system, or the use of somatic techniques and contact improvisation).
The third opportunity resides in the integration of contemporary dance practitioners as researchers
in interdisciplinary projects.
In areas such as HCI research projects involving novel or recent sensorial technologies, contemporary
choreographers and dancers can collaborate in the role of experts in embodied interaction.
Regarding future work, we detect potential in complementing the present research with
other approaches that engage with the paradigm shift in performance studies.
That is, looking at the body beyond movement: from an embodied interaction perspective,
shifting the focus from dance movement towards choreographic thinking and intermedial performance techniques.