How the technological and physical limitations in the new digital normal leads performers to improvise and innovate with constraints
Isolation and uncertainty in the current new normal has led to technological virtualization exemplified by online conference meetings, gatherings in virtual space, and connecting with other with remote presence technologies. These virtualization processes has diverse effects on people’s well-being and collaborative capabilities. Yet beyond evidence about negative emotions and reduction of communication efficiency caused by physical isolation and virtualization, there’s an unlikely source of positive adaption undertaken by creatives working during these times of uncertainty:
Performers specializing in the movement arts.
While many of us sit home in isolation to survive the pandemic, dancers and performance artists have been disatisfied with our new adaptions to the technologies for performance like Zoom and video sharing, and made it their careers to play with these new constraints, changing the way they work technologically, but more importantly, changing their own workflow to recapture the classic essences of performance: improvisation, audience interaction, and connection.
Here at the Studio for Narrative Spaces, we study how AI, robotics, and immersive spatial interactions can support or alter the way people collaborate and create. In regards to technology-mediated performance, we attempt to understand performers from the point of view of how they want to express themselves, what workflow do they use in everyday performance practice, and how new technology can hinder or improve their interactions. Our work focuses not on the technology themselves, but rather on the way humans interpret and are changed by them. But we also just want to have a bit of fun as well.
Case in point from one of the 25 professional performers we interviewed in our study is Zelia Tan (P10 from the paper). A classically trained graduate of Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, Zelia was initially quite concerned during the lockdown, where performances were canceled, and technologies were inadequate for showcasing her work. She found that multitasking was one of the new skill needed in this new milieu, where audiences on Zoom are mostly silent and yet oddly distracting due to their video and occasionally audio feeds. If she’s teaching dance on Zoom, it’s even worse, since she has to make sure everyone can see her very limited perspective being gazed at by a fixed camera, unable to show the space that she plays with in dance. In fact when she taught in Zoom it was really about asking students to imagine what their movements would look like in the real world: “I ask is it grass you’re sitting on? Imagine water flowing beneath you, how does that make you want to express?”
To Zelia, Covid-19 was neither a disaster nor a disruption; it was an opportunity for reinvention. While mask-wearing made performers look “deadfaced,” it also created ambiguity for audiences to imagine. The new performance formats allow dancers to dance to any background without actually being there, creating an immersive presence and a new way to imagine. The multiple perspectives also allow audiences to experience many fixed POVs, allowing the contraints to create a story. Zelia has since reshaped her career around the technology of dance, creating new works utilizing technology to narrate our interactions in space.
Zelia’s story is only one of the many shared in our social computing. Here is a brief summary of the findings we found working with performers:
- Performing asynchronously for online platforms feels being recorded in a movie with limited perspectives and multiple takes.
- A static camera cannot pick up all movements, forcing performers to become intimate with the technology and how they work rather than with audiences.
- New constraints are sources of inspiraiton for new ways of connecting with audiences.
- The time delay in a show in progress is like the idea of “deferral” in real life: we keep waiting until when the canceled show will finally be produced.
- Lack of feedback leads to the need to manage distractions online.
- Improvisation cannot take place online due to lack of audience engagement, but we can still refocus, like being able to keep moving even when we’re distracted online.
- “I always imagine that the audience is always smiling.”
- Lockdown leads to uncertainty, but also allows opportunity to work in small communities, working on our craft and trying new things.
- Started to adapt to new online formats, but oddly when the restrictions ceased, we still continued to use the online methods.
The interviews and insights gained led us to design a real-life human-robot showcase performance that pits a dancer (P20) with a robot arm located 12 hours apart. The show gave us an opportunity to learn more about how the dancer’s workflow is adapted to remote technology using a hands-on rehearsal and performance process. The in-person show is a case study on how one dancer develops a show with choreographers from beginning to end:
- The dancer had to imagine the audience’s view, improving to show the narrative of the piece.
- “I had a hard time feeling the robot because there’s a distance and a delay; it’s the same as communication with humans; we need time to build up our relationship.”
- Rehearsal is brain work, not physical work, because we have to imagine how a robot arm with no arms and legs moves in space with a dance partner that doesn’t move like it.
- The dancer learns from the robot arm movements what are possible, and begin to use the robotic metaphor in her own movements so that when the same song is repeated, she can improvise to the new constraint of a single-arm robot without human degrees of freedom.
To learn more about this work and engage with our studio, take a look at the paper here, and find us on instagram, on the web, and in-person in our university’s School of Creative Media. We welcome collaborators and interest from diverse disciplines. Hope to talk to you soon.
