RE: some other events in computer/dance land

Johannes Birringer (orpheus2@t-online.de)
Wed, 27 Aug 97 02:32 +0100

Hi members,

aha, much relieved to hear from Thecla that she and Lisa withstood current
trend to have computers on and clothes off.

We had some on and some off in our workshop, about which i can report later.
We had a heat wave too.

<Susan Kozel, Jean-Marc Matos and I (with many others!)
<participated in a dance and technology festival/worshop/conference
<together in France this summer ....

Your mentioning of your workshops this summer, Thecla, makes me wish to know
more about your experience, and feedback you got, and work results, and
reflection. Perhaps some of us could write brief reports or refer to websites if
material has been gathered, just in case members of our list are interested in
how things are getting along. I certainly would like very much to know how
workshop and experiment paramaters are functioning, what is being tested,
what we learn, how increasing work with digital processes affects, alters
our physical process.etc.

I am having a discussion about this with Amanda too,
and Imma and I also debated much our difficulties of modifying physically-based
dance research (collaborative development and joint composition of choreography,
video, sound, design, and digitized sequences) to the extent that emphasis
shifts to installation designs (which can be worked out within a 1 week or 10
day workshop time frame), loops and interfaces, and some parallel processes, but
this does not bode well generally for long-term shared dance process the way we
are used to. In other words, choreographic content, ideas, structure, dramaturgy
and precision may suffer if one works quickly on / with computers in the lab. As
far as our last experience is concerned, we abandoned LifeForms, sort of, after
trying it out. We also tried out some digitized editing for film sequences, and
worked with Adobe Premiere. I personally find it not physical enough, compared
to my analog experience with videodanse. The many special editing effects
generally don't excite me. So my next step will be interactive design and more
integrative (midi) processes that hopefully take time and allow us to develop
choreographic textures that evolve carefully. That pretty much puts
on-line/Internet experiments on hold, for one of our future workshops (among
list members I hope) where we can plan and prepare an event and ideas for a a
while, also carefully.

I am, in a sense, answering Amanda's somewhat impatient reaction to the webbed
meal idea we had a few weeks ago. I suggest some of us who are interested in a
shared project meet in the flesh and then cook a meal while we make a plan.

_____
Incidentally, "tanz aktuell" had an intriguing photo on page 37 of Jean-Marc
Matos' new piece "Technology of Tears" (great title), and I remember
thatJean-Marc had written me in the spring about his plans to work on this piece
in Cologne with filmmaker Lutz Gregor. I missed it, regretfully. Any observers
there?

regards,

Johannes Birringer
AlienNation Co.