movement
machines.org – A multi
modal, user-centred web platform for dance
Movementmachines.org – a multimodal, user-centered web platform for dance shows different dance-choreographic working strategies. A team of dancers uses videos, photographs, text excerpts, interviews, dance notations and drawings to guide users through working and creative processes and encourage further processing by the users.
The practice of contemporary choreography and dance today takes place beyond normative production practices and in an impressive diversity and individualisation. The focus of the website is on a conceptually comprehensible and sustainable storage of specific dance repertoires and the use of digital possibilities in the rehearsal processes of dance making. Individual, digital access enables dancers to engage directly with (archive) materials and the motoric repertoires saved in them.
In collision or collusion with conventional dance practice, digital working strategies can significantly expand the work of dancers. The specific use of digital processes can make the creative work of dancers more visible – creative work that is usually subsumed under the work of choreographers.
The title movementmachines.org deliberately suggests the mechanics of movement. Under the influence of forces, a body changes its position over time, subject to the laws of mass and propulsion, acceleration and direction in a specific reference system.
But which movement machines are meant? The dancer as the most perfect body machine possible? Or the thinking machines of dance? The machine-like nature of thought? The media machine? The „interfaces“ between man and machine seem to be becoming more blurred today. How and in what way is the advancing technomorphic character of the body also reflected in contemporary dance practices and what information do the artistic self-designs in the interface between body and machine provide?
Starting point
The Movement Machines project subsumes the research interests of a group of dancers and choreographers. The work of the artists involved in the movementmachines.org project began in the context of the Master’s program Movement Research at the Institute of Dance Arts-IDA of Anton Bruckner Private University (ABPU). The research-oriented profile of this program – conceptualised by Rose Breuss and Claudia Jeschke – and the expansion of the curricula into doctoral studies at the ABPU have so far provided an exciting field of experimentation in the IDA Dance Research Lab and offered a framework for dance praxeological research, including for the BMKOES project movementmachines.org.
In five micro-studies, this team explores largely unknown (archive) material by/about Vaslav Nijinsky, Gertrud Bodenwieser, Olga Szentpál, Andrei Jerschik and Isolde Klietmann. The core idea of the studies is the use of (archive) material as movement machines – as a productive synthesis of extraction and production, of material/media to dancing body and vice versa, of digitised to contemporary, idiosyncratic artistic gesture and vice versa. Movement machines translate, transpose, transfer, couple, ‚queer‘ or associate material/media and dance physique.