Choreographic Explorations in the Middle and the Excess

Abstract

Examining how the choreographic improvisation system Tools that Propel (TTP) facilitates dancers to excavate their habitual movement for new creative potential, this article questions whether the co-evolution of technology and humans – technogenesis – can bring about new understanding to the nature of habit. TTP enables intra-acting dancers to improvise with their own virtual body, seen moving in two superimposed moments of time; past incidences of movement are folded into present ones (projected on screen) when the system determines them to be recurring in the motion it tracks on the floor. Through an entanglement of the embodied and virtual gesture the intra-acting dancer explores their movement habits; improvising with TTP they can investigate the effects of movements and rewind to their causes, investigating a movement’s centre, its fulcrum, the moment of action (and potential) itself. TTP both reveals and is a process of becoming. It is a diffraction apparatus (Karen Barad (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.) enabling the re-conception of previously perceived entities in its entanglement of phenomena and a system of metastable equilibrium (Gilbert Simondon (2011 [1958]) ‘On the mode of existence of technical objects’, trans Ninian Mallamphy, Dan Mallamphy and Nandita Biswas Mallamphy, Deleuze Studies 5(3): 407–24) repeatedly bringing intra-actors back to the brink of emergence – the preformal universe before the separation of subject and object. This article argues that with(in) TTP the improvisation unfolds in a constant shifting process with no fixed boundary between subject and object – the becoming occurring in the movement between them. It posits that if nothing pre-exists the intra-action between phenomena, and thus the process of becoming, then arguably there is no such thing as habit at all; for nothing is fixed as an object, a thing, an entity, but always dynamically, and intra-actively, emerges as new potential.

Notes

1 Where many motion capture sensors require markers on a specially created motion capture bodysuit, Microsoft Kinect 2 sensor is a markerless tracker.

2 ‘Online’ in this context means that the data is processed live, rather than offline.

3 For further technical discussion of TTP see Levinsky and Russell (2019).

4 This can be seen in the video Yi Holding Space (Levinsky 2021).