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ABSTRACT
Choreographer William Forsythe calls the work Duo a ‘project’—reflecting the piece’s long history of vicissitudes from 1996 to the present. We attempt to visualize continuity and change over several iterations of Duo, spanning a period of 20 years. Our methods involved graphical and statistical approaches to performance video annotation, considering seven videos acquired from Forsythe’s private archive. Collaboration with Duo dancers was critical to develop this choreographic knowledge. The duet Duo was chosen to focus on annotation of partnering, choreographic structure, and interpretation; the case study furthermore enabled review of annotation methods from Forsythe’s Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced (Forsythe et al. 2009) and built upon prior research of entrainment in Duo (Waterhouse, Watts, and Bläsing 2014). Studying a choreography longitudinally, with close regard of the performers’ testimonies and digital traces, the problem required innovative methods. For this article, we focus on how annotation was used within this project. We outline our particular interdisciplinary approach, merging perspectives from dance studies, praxeology and creative coding. We present the language and concepts of annotation chosen, technical tools used for annotating, procedures of annotation analysis, and conclusions of the research. Thereby we present novel visualizations of choreographic process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Both tours, Sylvie Guillem: Life in Progress and A Quiet Evening of Dance, were produced by Sadlers Well’s Theatre of London.
2 The theoretical debates on the difficulties of obtaining knowledge of tacit skills and practical understanding are beyond our scope here. From a basic performance studies approach, we were aware of the ‘inescapable transformation’ that happens to performance in writing (Phelan Citation1993/Citation2006, p.148); from a praxeological one, were also concerned with the potential to ‘destroy’ studies of practice through ‘instruments of objectification’ (Bourdieu Citation1980/1990, p. 11). Sociologist John Law takes a stance similar to ours, advocating that, ‘methods, their rules, and even more methods’ practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand’ (Law Citation2004, 5).
3 Our research was conducted within two interdisciplinary projects: ‘Motion Together’ (Free University of Berlin/Bielefeld University/Hochschule Mainz) and ‘Dancing Together’ (University of Bern/Hochschule der Künste Bern) supported by the Volkswagen Foundation and the SNSF respectively.
4 These were unedited videos made by Forsythe’s team for the purpose of internal documentation, not edited dance films.
5 These annotations relied on Waterhouse’s expertise as a Forsythe dancer and could not be automated or distributed to assistants.
6 It is possible that this key performance selection overemphasizes change, through its criteria. For example, the key video from 2016, which was a performance in a church, has been criticized by Forsythe as a very specific and unusual setting, and not representative of the project. Yet, Watts found the performance video important to his performance history and Waterhouse had seen the performance live—warranting its inclusion. Had the annotation process not been concluded in early 2018, a video of Dialogue (DUO2015) from the Quiet Evening of Dance tour would have been important to consider.
7 The performers estimate this was a performance in the UK in summer 2015.
9 We use the terms movement and motion interchangeably in this article.
10 Forsythe and the dancers call this ‘counterpoint.’ Since they also describe the overall compositional practice within Duo counterpoint, we chose to differentiate terms: we use counterpoint in this article as the name for the overall compositional system, and concurrent motion to designate rhythmically related motion.
11 More generally, rhythms superimposed by chance (i.e. without the dancers’ shared rhythmical interaction) is a feature of some of Forsythe’s choreographies. This would have been classified as other had it occurred in Duo.
12 For our purposes, it was not necessary to divided the sequence into singular movements—chunks or short phrases sufficed. Initially Waterhouse annotated the building blocks using a consistent labeling scheme that mixed the dancers’ and her own terms (like ‘goldfinger’ and ‘umpadump’). These are shown in , Columns G and H. In the end, this was supplemented with numerical identifiers, as shown in and .
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Notes on contributors
Elizabeth Waterhouse
Dr. Elizabeth Waterhouse is a dancer and postdoc at the Institute of Theatre Studies at the University of Bern where she is part of the research project “Auto_Bio_Graphy as Performance” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research as a dance scholar focuses on choreographic practices and aesthetics, ethnographic and oral history methodology, as well as digital techniques for research and documentation of dance practices. Waterhouse danced from 2004–2012 in Ballett Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company. In 2019, she was awarded a PhD in dance studies from the University of Bern/Hochschule der Künste Bern.
Florian Jenett
Florian Jenett is a Professor for Media Informatics / Digital Design in the Design Department of the Hochschule Mainz – University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He also co-directs the Motion Bank at Hochschule Mainz.
Monika Hager
Dr. Monika Hager completed her PhD in elementary particle physics in 2019 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Bern. She is an independent researcher in acoustic monitoring and sonification and works part-time as a high school teacher for physics.
Mark Coniglio
Mark Coniglio is a media artist, composer, and programmer. He is recognized as a pioneer in the integration of live performance and interactive digital technology. With choreographer Dawn Stoppiello he is co-founder of Troika Ranch, a New York City based performance group that integrates music, dance, theater and interactive digital media in its performance works. He is also the creator of Isadora®, a flexible media manipulation tool that provides interactive control over digital video and sound.
