When we think of dance in its most basic form, we think of it as a way of artistic expression
through body movement.
However, when we think of technology in dance, the image is less clear than, for instance,
the use of technology in painting or in music.
The reason is that the tool of expression in dance, which is the abstract movement of
the human body, cannot be simply captured in digital formats without losing its essence.
Intrigued by this unique challenge, we conducted a systematic review on the literature of dance
and choreography in HCI for the past two decades.
My name is Qiushi Zhou, and I will present an overview of our findings on behalf of my
co-authors.
In this review, we discuss the literature from two perspectives.
First, we focus on the body as the instrument of artistic expression in dance, and look
at how technology contributed to the recognition and analysis of the expressive qualities in
dance movement.
Then, we look at how technology has influenced the practice of dance making in existing case
studies.
So what is the body in the context of dance?
From an HCI perspective, the dancer’s body is a physical interface that can be accessed
and extended through technology.
We can read the bodily signals through physiological sensors, to directly control multimedia stage
effects, and to provide context for further augmentation of the performance.
We can also write to the body through its underlying sensory-neural system to alter
the felt experience of the dancer.
Physical costumes can change the dancers’ perception of their own bodies
and redefine the possibility of movement.
A similar effect can be achieved with visual and acoustic effects which influence the dancer’s
lived experience on stage.
Recognising and analysing the expressive movement qualities has been another direction of the
research in dance.
Learning from existing frameworks for categorising movement qualities, such as the Laban Movement
Analysis, previous works have attempted to automatically detect movement qualities and
convert them to visual output, and to help with choreographic training and education.
Equipped with advanced technology such as motion tracking and machine learning, HCI
dance researchers are still faced with a major challenge, of quantifying the kinesthetic
creativity, the felt experience of the dancers and the expressive movement qualities, channelled
through the embodied perception from the choreographers to the audience.
As a result, previous works have employed alternative approaches to the body and its
abstract movement apart from the direct bodily sensing and motion capturing.
One of the promising trends of those approaches is the use of virtual and physical agents
to accompany the dancer’s performance while forming new bodily relationships on stage
For instance, neural networks have been used to create virtual body extensions that react
to different features in the movement of the dancers.
Robotic agents have also been explored extensively, including drones
that respond to specific types of movement from human dancers, and autonomous agents
that collaboratively improvise with the human dancers.
The other perspective in our review is to look at how technology has influenced the
creative process of dance in practice.
Those works include novel tools for choreographers, such as sketching interfaces that help reflect
abstract choreographic ideas, and recording and annotating tools used across the development
process of a dance project.
The common conclusion from those works is that the creative process of dance is highly
complex and idiosyncratic, and the introduction of technology may produce unexpected impact.
For instance, while choreographic tools with online user interface makes communication
between choreographers and dancers more easily accessible, they also caused disturbance in
the creative process, due to the change of context from face-to-face
rehearsals to the online text communications.
Overall, the challenges and opportunities reflected in the field of dance during the
past twenty years contributed a wealth of knowledge that benefit broader HCI research
in the context of creativity support and beyond.
The focus on the lived experience of the body and the attention to the diverse and specific
cultural contexts in dance, embody the characteristics of what we call the third-wave shift of HCI.
The unique offerings in HCI dance research, such as the bodily improvisation with robotic
agents and the attempts to reflect abstract movement qualities using computational tools,
provoke future works in HCI to re-think the relationships between human experience and
technology.
Thank you for watching, and we invite you to read the paper for more details.