Designing Dance: Embodiment, Experience, and Ephemerality
CfD Conversation 2022_02 | February 25th, 2022
I had the pleasure of taking part in the planning and execution of CfD Conversation 2022–02 with a few members of our “Embodying Information” research team consisting of Laura Perovich, Ilya Vidrin, and myself. In curating this conversation, we set out to share the potentialities of dance, embodiment, and choreography with the goal of bringing these to the spotlight within both the Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media, and Design community and our design networks beyond.
By discussing dance discourse we hope that our audiences may begin to see the stark similarities between choreographic practice and design thinking. We hope to illustrate the affordances of dance as inquiry, as articulation, as healing, as facilitation, as inflection, as interaction… the list could go on forever…
As I’m also a dancer, choreographer, co-founder and artistic director of a concert dance company Evolve Dynamicz, I will be sprinkling in some of my own interpretations, explanations, and experiences throughout this blog post… which will inevitably show my bias towards the subject, but as everyone who‘s ever met me knows, dance must be part of everything I do because I just really love dancing! 😊
Movement is Knowledge
Each of our panelists uses their dance education daily in ways that may not be so obvious to those outside the field. Just like equations are knowledge to engineers or models hold knowledge for an architect, movement is the knowledge of dancers, choreographers, and somatic practitioners.
Being a dancer myself, embodiment is at the core of my creative practices. Our instruments are our bodies, meaning we must be deeply attuned to them as we are mastering our craft. Our bodies hold information not only about ourselves but also about our physical environments and social contexts. The reflexivity of our knowledge is something that I believe can enhance the design process.
Logics, iteration, & emergence
Lauren Bedal is an interaction designer and choreographer working as part of Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) lab. Her work both onstage and off is a blend of movement and HCI. She brings her knowledge of movement to ATAP in the designing of interface input technologies.
Lauren reminded us that movement is the ultimate input device, from our phones to computers to automatic doors. She broke down the ATAP process; they begin with a radar technology that can detect and capture movement at different scales. With the sensor outputs, they then begin to physically visualize movement through iterative movement studies. From these studies, a set of choreographed input tasks emerge called movement primitives — a basic unit of movement that can be paired with a computer system response. The guiding logics for these studies come from Google’s corporate goals for the product or project.
While Lauren’s work at Google follows a logics→iteration→emergence sequencing, her artistic work outside the company follows more of an iteration→emergence→logics model. Lauren’s beautifully captivating artistic studies begin to demonstrate this for us. She starts with iteration to discover what movement or themes emerge, which then inform a logic for the project.
Lauren brings attention to her processes here to point out what she sees as the difference between design and dance, choreography, or other art forms. As opposed to designers who work with ideas first, she points out that artists start by working with the raw material to build an intuition about that artistic medium.
Dance as food for nourishment
While Lauren’s knowledge is applied to interfaces, Jessica Roseman’s knowledge is grounded in equity and justice. Jessica Roseman, an award-winning dancer and choreographer, is a jack of many embodied trades — a Feldenkrais practitioner, massage therapist, personal trainer, choreographer, and solo performer.
NOURISH, a recent ongoing project of hers, is a participatory dance project which can be done anywhere by anyone. Jess describes her aspiration for this project as being something that everyone is able to implement at the beginning of public events, like a football game, as a pledge of allegiance to taking care of yourself… which I find to be so beautiful. What would the world look like if we all enacted a nourish practice?
Jess shared video clips of a few renditions of NOURISH showcasing her process of participatory dancemaking both within herself and in collaboration with others. In choreographing a solo performance of NOURISH she participates with all of her body’s living systems — assessing where and what sensations she’s feeling, directing energy and attention, creating feedback loops of assessing and acting in the present moment.
She brings this embodied presence to her participatory dances with the community. In one of the clips she shared, she is teaching participants about consent for physical touch, demonstrating how to both advocate for your own boundaries and how to respect the boundaries of others. I found this to be so powerful because this form of radical self-acceptance, taking ownership over your own body, is a form of justice.
Jess also gave a fantastic metaphor for dance as food (I’m definitely stealing this one):
- tiktok is like a bag of chips: fun, enjoyable, goes down easy, you finish it and it’s gone
- Professional dance concerts are like iron chef: it’s a full evening experience curated by a chef [choreographer] who is excellent at their craft and have the necessary funds to do their best work [international touring]
- Her work is like a recipe for chicken soup: learn the steps to support your own personal needs like you might have your own recipe
Learn more about Jess and her ongoing project NOURISH here and if you’re in the Boston area, you might even consider hiring her for your next community event. 😊
Ambivalent choreographies
Sydney Skybetter, Senior Lecturer and the Associate Chair of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies at Brown University, thinks and speaks about dance in much of the same way that we are trained to think about design problems in design school. He started with a provocation by dance scholar and historian Sarah Wilbur, “Dance is a fantastic problem.”
Besides being ~a way of life~ dance is also a way of asking problems, a way of analyzing complex situations, a heuristic. It opens up possibilities for thinking, doing, being, relating, and more; but these possibilities are not neutral. In his words, the “squishy, granola, east village modern dance” dance-is-always-good mindset is not necessarily true as we dancers sometimes like to tell ourselves it is. While dance can indeed be employed towards (good) worthy causes, the way dancers are working with industry is changing and we need to be conscious of it. Because our knowledge can also amplify injustices.
But before we get too into the weeds here, let's enjoy some dancing robots!
In the performance setting, dancers and choreographers contend with a lot of often moving environmental inputs — something which needs to be programmed into a robot’s movement vocabulary. And so a roboticist can draw from a dancer’s knowledge to train robots how to also contend with many moving environmental inputs.
Brown University purchased two of these robots from Boston Dynamics which Sydney uses in the studio classroom. His students' movement knowledge is used to generate the movements that robots are able to perform. And with his new course at Brown titled “Choreorobotics 0101,” he is teaching dancers to teach robots how to dance. (In alignment with one of our initiatives at the CfD, I think this qualifies Sydney a metadesigner here. 😉)
But here’s where those not-neutral possibilities come in… Boston Dynamics technologies are involved in policing and combat settings, so in essence, dancers are being used to create better policing by these robots. While Boston Dynamics puts a line on their robots banning the connection of automatic weapons, other companies will inevitably fill the demand and will not be banning it.
In an opinion piece on Wired Sydney writes:
“But such dazzling, performative displays of cutting-edge robotic technology (always set to up-tempo music by artists of color) can also be seen as an attempt to distance the Boston Dynamics brand from its military industrial roots.”
In his choreorobotics course, he and his students grapple with this ambivalence, not shying away from the uncomfortable conversations about dance having the potential to harm and to perpetuate injustices. And therein lies at least one big-impact example of, not only the importance of higher-ed dance education, but also the inestimable value it holds.
Dance is a fantastic problem… and also a teaching opportunity
Sydney so beautifully stated this at the end of his presentation and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to further expand on it! In his courses, he’s using dance as an avenue toward critical engagement with topics such as social justice.
Lauren explained how she uses dance pedagogy in creating training sequences for a gesture library at Google ATAP. The imagery used for guiding movement in the dance studio is directly transferable in this context. For example, in training users how to do a swiping gesture, she uses imagery to reference something users can understand, such as brushing your hand on a table for a swipe gesture.
When I was in college studying both physics and dance, it was actually my movement knowledge that helped me get through all those upper-level quantum mechanics courses and not the amount of time I spent in the Physics library (to the dismay of some of my classmates). Dance helped not only with stress relief but also to solidify abstract concepts. In my graduate architectural studies, I immediately understood the value of iterative inquiry within the design process, I knew how to collaborate with others, and I was able to conceptualize my building designs from a somatic perspective.
Jess uses her deeply integrated somatic knowledge in service of communities, teaching self-guided movement and bodywork. She facilitates embodied experiences through dance, made possible by her years of training, practice, and experience. Overall, her work uses dance to teach communities how to heal, something I connect deeply with through my own work.
One of my company’s current initiatives is mental health advocacy through dance which emerged from the expression of my grief after my father passed in 2019. We’ve learned to use movement in processing life together as a community, supporting each other through the ups and downs. By approaching stigma through the language of movement, our dancers and audience members have begun to feel more at ease with discussing their own mental health. We’ve witnessed how spoken language becomes more accessible after movement reconciled the loaded words that add weight to stigma.
I feel very fortunate to be surrounded by dancers who didn’t and still don’t shy away from the expression of my grief — something that proved to be more valuable than we could have ever possibly imagined with the onset of the pandemic.
The dance industry was hit hard by the pandemic, many local theaters and studios had to close. Dancers and companies wouldn’t exist without our spaces for rehearsing and performing, so please support your local theater and support local dance artists! Because we have the embodied knowledge and experience in community building that can help us all through our grieving processes and to reconnect with ourselves and one another going forward.
Want more? Watch the recording of the event here!
CAMD Curators and Moderators
Nicole Zizzi, Design Research & Communications, Center for Design & Co-founder and Artistic Director of Boston-based concert dance company Evolve Dynamicz
Laura Perovich, Assistant Professor, Art & Design, CAMD, Northeastern University
Ilya Vidrin, Choreographer, Dramaturg, and Postdoctoral Teaching Associate, Theater, CAMD, Northeastern University
Panelists
Lauren Bedal, Interaction Designer, Google ATAP and Choreographer
Jessica Roseman, Award-Winning Dance Performer and Choreographer
Sydney Skybetter, Senior Lecturer, and the Associate Chair of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies at Brown University
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