This is an experiment in dance.
It has been influenced by watching modern dance and learning a little bit about choreography. I was particularly interested in seeing people dancing to experimental music. There are various examples on YouTube of choreography set to Xenakis or Stockhausen and you can see how the choreographer has chosen movements to interpret the music.
Among these videos I was struck by the choreography of Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker, in particular when she and colleagues dance to Steve Reich. In a book by de Keersmaeker she writes about the systematic design of these early dances. She uses geometric diagrams to describe the proposed use of space and systematic sequences of movements to notate the dance.
How can that idea be applied to video? The Bracket Dance video featured here has a structure based on de Keersmaeker's description of her dances. The video is 48 secs long and is made up of 12 sections, some of which repeat
A BB CC DD EE F G H
Each section in turn is made up of 8 dance positions (here orientation of the brackets). So, for example
where the dance positions are
These orientations match the audio (almost) exactly, although that is not always necessary for the illusion of synchronisation to be experienced.
To what extent is it necessary to synch the video with audio?
Cage and Cunningham famously devised some joint works completely separately. You can see Cunningham dancing with Cage's music accompanying, and be told that there was no rehearsal, that Cunningham didn't plan to coordinate with the music, but that as an observer you see synchronisation where none was designed. This is either because the dancer responds to the audio or, I believe, that the observer sees relationships that are coincidental.
One of my targets in recent video production has been that both the audio and the moving images are independently interesting.
In practice you can easily test this by playing each separately. Sometimes dance looks unusual without the audio, even if you have the sound of feet scraping the floor. But often the video can be watched with the sound off and still enjoyed.
Whether the audio can be enjoyed separately is another matter. But most often, music was written to be listened to without movement, so it would be a natural expectation.
The design of dance using blocks as I have done here has some similarity to the design of music where phrases are written separately and joined together in sequence. Famously Terry Riley wrote "in C" on a single page where 53 phrases are listed and players are allowed to proceed through them in sequence repeating phrases if they wish. This means that they go out of phase, but the phrases have been designed for this to work.
We can revise our Bracket Dance to this pattern by using two pairs of brackets and arranging that each pair follow the pattern ABCDEFG, but where each pair can repeat a block as many times as they wish.
This will be my next experiment ...
Updated March 2024 -- Back to Top