Lab Brazil: Parquear Bando digital annotation: on digital scores for collective performance interventions in public spaces

ABSTRACT

Parquear Bando is an urban intervention designed for up to 20 people to perform in urban city centres. While describing this urban intervention and analysing parts of the material available in the online pilot publication, we will discuss the limits and potentialities of a digitization process for this improvised performance. We question whether it would be possible to use digital annotations as support for future performances of this collective action without the physical presence of its facilitators but still maintaining the main concerns and principles of Parquear Bando. The three-day workshop shares the intervention’s most common structure and composes a performance to be shown in a selected place of each city. During the Motion Bank Lab Brazil 2019, we started to create a digital archive for the workshop with the aim of finding a consistent documentation model using video annotations, recording interviews and digitizing some of the choreographers’ notebooks. Beyond the digital archive of this urban intervention, we are also interested in making the score and movement principles of this piece available to other groups who could perform Parquear Bando in different contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Contemporary dance
• performance improvisation
• digital video annotation
• online dance archives
• urban interventions
• reenactment
• performing arts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Motion Bank Lab Brazil http://scores.motionbank.org/brazillab2019/ Parquear Bando by Margô Assis and Thembi Rosa; A Projetista by Dudude Herrmann; and Bols & Worp by Dorothé Depeauw, Matthias Koole and Flávia Mafra were the pieces participants on this lab in 2019.

2 Piecemaker (PM) was introduced to the creative process of The Forsythe Company from 2007 to 2013.

‘Developed by David Kern, PM was intended to support the organisation and recall of materials created in the rehearsal studio. PM used a free-text based annotation system combined with tags and other standard elements, and it was the basis from which the Motion Bank project developed its own versions to support development and publication of its on-line scores with choreographers Deborah Hay and Jonathan Burrows.’ (Scott deLahunta, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, Frédéric Bevilacqua, Rosemary Cisneros, Katerina El Raheb, Carla Fernandes, Anton Koch, Thembi Rosa, Sarah Whatley at ‘MOCO Annotation Workshop’. In the Extended Abstracts of the International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO), Genoa, 2018).

3 Parquear (2012) was original conceived as a performance for four dancers: Margô Assis, Renata Ferreira, Thembi Rosa and Kênia Dias and it was funded by Rumos Itaú Cultural Dance Prize in the Dance for Children category (2012–2014). https://cargocollective.com/multiplex/Parquear-2013-1.

4 Nelson (2004) ‘Before your eyes. Seeds of a Dance Practice’: http://sarma.be/docs/3247.

5 http://scores.motionbank.org/brazillab2019/.

6 We are considering ‘digital score’ in a broad field of investigation that consists of the various versions and attempts of digital visualizations of choreography. A relevant discussion on this topic can be seen in Bleeker (2017). Recording in many different formats, digital annotation, digitization of choreographer’s notebooks, interviews about the choreography can be some of the source materials to the building of digital scores. At Synchronous Object and Motion Bank site we have many examples of digital scores or choreographic objects, terms used by these projects to established a multiplicity of modes of visualization of choreographic principles digitally.

7 ‘Small dance’ is how the choreographer Steve Paxton refers to the minimal movements we keep doing only to be standing up

8 Choreographic Coding Lab, CCL7: http://choreographiccoding.org/#lab-brazil_16.

9 Motion Bank (MB) is a research project of the Mainz University of Applied Sciences co-directed by Florian Jenett and Scott deLahunta. MB is dedicated to researching the documentation and translation of contemporary dance practice into digital form, with a focus on annotation and presentation of time-based recordings. The objective of the Lab in BH was to nourish the dialogue between MB and the work of local choreographers: Dudude Herrmann, Dorothé Depeauw, Margô Assis and Thembi Rosa. They have engaged with the MB team in the digital documentation, annotation and vizualisation of some of their choreographic works and processes, in particular A Projetista, Bols & Worp and Parquear Bando by Dança Multiplex. Public workshops, presentations, conversations with local and international artists were part of the program. MB Brazil was coordinated by Thembi Rosa and Scott deLahunta and counted on the collaboration of Luiz Naveda (Brazil) Carla Fernandes (Portugal) and Daniel Bisig (Switzerland). (Diffusion material about the LAB is available at the Facebook page of the LAB. https://www.facebook.com/events/333665037501058).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thembi Rosa

Thembi Rosa, since 2000, has been producing her work on the field of dance in partnership with many artist from music and digital arts, presenting performances, installations, urban interventions, and acting in the production of international residences. Choreographic Coding Lab, CCL 7; Motion Bank Lab Brazil; coMobambooR-IoT; Parquear Bando are some of them. She takes part in Dance Multiplex with Margô Assis, and founded CasaManga, a collective space for art and health. She takes part on the ICNOVA Research Group on Performance & Cognition and at TEPe, a research project from Lisbon University and the Federal University of Ceará. She holds a PhD in Art and Technology by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (2020) Proex/CAPES scholarship under the supervision of Prof. Dr Carlos Falci, and a Master degree on Dance at PPG-Dance by the Federal University of Bahia (2010). Her texts have been published in Cartografias da Dança by Rumos Itaú, Cultural Dança, FID, Interferencias-the book, amongst others. https://cargocollective.com/multiplex

Carla Fernandes

Carla Fernandes Ph.D in Cognitive Linguistics. Currently working as Principal Investigator and Invited Professor at FCSH – Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Co-founder of the ICNOVA Research Group on Performance & Cognition. Awarded an ERC grant for the interdisciplinary project BlackBox, running at FCSH-UNL from 2014 to 2020, under her direction as PI, with a research focus in the intersection of Arts&Cognition topics, Multimodal Communication, New Media and the Performing Arts (from cognitive and ethnographic perspectives).

Full Partner in several EU-funded R&D projects at the crossings of Arts and Science, Intangible Heritage Documentation and Technology. Principal Investigator of the FCT-funded ‘TKB project’ in Portugal (A Transmedia Knowledge-Base for contemporary dance) with partners from the AHK Amsterdam and Coventry University from 2009 to 2013. Author of book chapters and papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences in the fields of Cognitive Linguistics, Multimodal Communication, Performance Studies, Digital Media and Intangible Heritage. Supervisor of numerous MA and PhD thesis in those same fields, she often serves in PhD juries, as well as in the Evaluation Panels of the EU Cost Actions Programme. http://blackbox.fcsh.unl.