School of Dance uses technology for performance collaboration

In this dance, the technological choreography is just as important as the dynamic movements of the dancers.

During the Intermedia Festival of Telematic Arts, April 23-25, dancers from the Florida State University School of Dance in Tallahassee and the Butler University Department of Dance in Indianapolis will perform together in real time over the Internet for an audience at the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library. The collaboration is one way that dance technologists such as Tim Glenn conduct research into new ways to design dance events and gain access to performance venues at distant locations.

“We experiment with networking technologies, as well as camera and projection geometry,” said Glenn, an associate professor of dance at Florida State and a charter member of the Association for Dance and Performance Telematics. “The intent is to stretch the boundaries of performance research.”

The Intermedia Festival of Telematic Arts uses Internet2, the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium, as a forum for artists, musicians, videographers, dancers, actors and writers from around the world to perform and discuss their works. The festival will showcase three of Glenn’s choreographic works: multimedia projects “Silk by Night” and “Catharsis,” and dance project “Life, Shapes & the Future of History Condensed.”

Under Glenn’s direction, Florida State technology specialist Chris Cameron and a team of graduate students will produce a multicamera broadcast that will be projected on large video screens in Indianapolis.

“The two main dances that will be broadcast from FSU to a primary screen in Indianapolis will be shot as a three-camera live mix by our dance-technology graduate students,” Glenn said. “Additional, pre-edited movie files will be played on secondary screens in the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library to synchronize with the Internet broadcast. The audience in Indianapolis will experience the dances as an edited choreography for the camera.”

In addition to the Butler University Department of Dance, Florida State’s other partners in this performance research are the Donald Tavel Arts Technology Research Center at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, which is hosting the festival, and Dance Kaleidoscope, Indiana’s premier professional contemporary dance company.

Over the past few months, a great deal of time was spent planning and rehearsing the camera angles and edits that will be performed, according to Glenn.

“I’ve traveled to Indianapolis twice and spent countless hours videoconferencing, swapping e-mails and having phone conversations with the project choreographers, directors and technical staff of our research partners,” Glenn said. “I spent an entire day with (festival director) Scott Deal and the other two choreographers, Cynthia Pratt (of Butler University) and David Hochoy (of Dance Kaleidoscope), in a brainstorming retreat to map out the dance event for the festival.”

As an example of the way dance and technology can be combined, the performance of “Silk by Night” will feature live-feed videography of dancer Ella Rosewood, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a pre-edited atmosphere of moonlight and clouds as seen through a forest in Tallahassee. Glenn, operating the live camera, will coordinate his camera movement and framing with the dance as it is performed.

“This combination of live and projected imagery will create a multidimensional design of kinetic motion,” he said.

The festival will be the fifth such telematic event that Florida State’s dance technology team has participated in over the past seven years.

“These activities make it possible for our dancers at FSU to perform for an audience outside of our region and experience a new model for performance design,” Glenn said.