Hoffmann's Delusion
These thoughts were never so beautifully formulated as in the romantic period, in the nineteenth century. With the high point, of course, of the fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann. As hallucinatory as if he'd been tripping, his world is an expression of fear and yearning to rule and yet to be used. Sensory perceptions are disordered; the contents of human consciousness merge smoothly into one another. This is called psychological delusion, when we confuse fact and fiction, reality and illusion with each other, or when no dividing line can be discerned between waking and dreaming, night and day, conscious and unconscious.
This legacy of Hoffmann's is still clearly visible everywhere in contemporary dance. The romantic tension between machine and mind, between puppet and body, remains essential, for choreography too. The old terms do not immediately apply here; what is executed in the human-robot opposition is analog-versus-digital tension. Or the contrast between dancers as digital objects and objects that are actual dancers.
Cunningham's Life Forms
When Merce Cunningham (thanks to the dance programme Life Forms, partially initiated by him)1
1 Life Forms 3.0, Credo Interactive Inc., 1998
had succeeded in expanding his computer monitor into a dance floor, a classical dream seemed to have been made real. The desire to control the human body like a marionette, that eternally recurring topic, was finally borne out. Cunningham, a sly fox who never grows old and seems to regard his own body as more or less immortal, could now choreograph digitally. And at the same time he could save his old work not only on video (by artistic co-conspirator Nam June Paik among others), but also digitally. Fashionable technological forms (little 3-d bodies that take the virtual stage like crazy tin soldiers) were supposed to make one forget the real human material in this digital mirror of the analog performances. Digital bodies, without organs, bones or muscles, but with an extremely flexible skin with which a body could be completely pulled apart, which could stimulate all kinds of expected and unimagined movements. With the limitation, of course, that while the choreographer is always dealing with real people on the stage, where the signature of the dancer sets the tone, here he works with something like a corpse in a dissecting room, as a placebo, a substitute for the real thing.
Life Forms seemed the dream of a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk, a multimedia theme that had also made Director, the multimedia programme for the first generation of cd-rom makers, popular. Life Forms, with a basis similar to Director's, wanted to evoke that dream. It spoke a language that was most of all lofty and elegant, and bore witness to a conspiratorial cultural dream. It wasn't for nothing that the interface of both programmes was aimed at a multidisciplinary whole that was supposed to unite various media. Director spoke of film as well as music, of scenario and scoring; Life Forms sought to approach this ideal just as programmatically.
Now, in Life Forms version 3.0, the cable seems to have developed a kink. Just as Director was superseded by Flash, which was more practical and answered the everydayness of the Internet, Life Forms has problems with more practical contemporary interpretation. For that provocative dream of Cunningham's proves to have a hard time resisting the limitations of reality. However understandable the desire for a dance company on one's computer is, clearly that dream must stay a dream. The newest version has not really gained much compared to the original version. The very sketchy design mostly gives the impression of a past desire is trying, to no avail, to work its way into the present-day interface. Life Forms is literally stuck in its ambitious interface. Everything exudes a visionary air that calls up a desire for transformation even as its realisation is counteracted by a dated transcendental component. The obtrusive syntax - which is not immediately oriented toward practice but mainly makes palpable a desire for departure from the limitations of analog reality for the liberating domain of the digital sphere - is a consequence of Cunningham's visionary gaze, which, though it once evoked sympathy, now appears to be chiefly artistically visionary-totalitarian in character. Life Forms is badly in need of updating. But just as Flash is no improvement on the dream of Director - on the contrary, it is most of all a realistic adaptation to everyday new technology - Life Forms too is need of a more everyday execution.
Forsythe's Life Forms
There is one aspect of Life Forms''' training sessions that is still irresistible, though. For while the 'dancers' themselves bear the stigma of 'odd little figures', the dance floor on which they move is nothing less than a magical object. In Life Forms'' the dancers can actually float freely in space on the boards. They are thus in an almost hallucinatory sphere, like a flying carpet which moves as if in a vacuum and almost makes one forget gravity.
This rock-solid conceptual instrument also pops up in William Forsythe's cd-rom Improvisation Technologies.2
2 William Forsythe, Improvisation Technologies, zkm
Karlsruhe, 1994 and 1999 It is undoubtedly the finest application of Cunningham's original concept, partly because the digital dance lessons are performed here not by the rendered figures, but by Forsythe himself and his dancers. His dancers (Christine, Noah, Thomas and Crystal and Forsythe himself) display diverse scenes from a choreography by the Frankfurt balletmaster. In a dazzling public performance he uses here a fine variation of 'the flying carpet' as a fixed foundation for his expositions. In a single Quicktime window, in an otherwise dark space, Forsythe gives a personal training which makes the cd-rom user an apprentice of his dance ensemble.
Improvisation Technologies, produced in Director, turns out to far exceed Life Forms because of the real dancers. The ballet Self meant to govern3
3 only on the 1994 cd-rom
seems to be the perfect version of this programme. It is a new interpretation of Balanchine's classic Apollon Musagete, a well-oiled modernist machine from 1928 - with the legendary music of Stravinsky - which is broken open here in a ballet which seems to consist only of separate movements. A single live-improvisation violin solo here displays a graphic and associative abc of movement. In a single glance the little Quicktime films cover the whole stage on which the dancers, as it were, render digitalised life forms with their live bodies. Here the body appears as a mechanical instrument; it is sometimes actually as if a machine of rods and pistons is driving these bodies forward. Movement is a circumstance of the fact that you happen to be disappearing, Forsythe says, and his choreographies again and again generate new postures and transform new or underexposed aspects of the body. These can then very easily be disordered again by scratching with Quicktime. After all, a real vj takes all sorts of modern body dialects from films of gangsta rappers, boarders, skaters and others, such as the movements of computer game superheroes, which were not immediately Forsythe's first concern.
So while Improvisation Technologies seems on the one hand to be the ideal application of Life Forms, this cd-rom also shows something else. For however brightly the interface, a good match for Forsythe's magical material, shines, the end of the artistic cd-rom ultimately proves to have dawned. The interface, which is didactically very responsible, ultimately poorly serves the user. For the cd-rom is not only a limited selection from the original four gigabytes of material on Forsythe's hard drive in Frankfurt, the otherwise very subtle Director interface, too, stands in the way of new technology. At a time when streaming video is flourishing, and a continuous online connection with Forsythe's server is theoretically possible, differently grounded and much more efficient interfaces will now have to be developed to effect future dreams.
Lara movement theory
In Krisztina de Chatel's ballet Lara and Friends, Lara Croft, the protagonist of the computer game Tomb Raider, undergoes all sorts of tranformations with rather a didactic touch. She plays main role and supporting role, central theme and outsider, is firmly entrenched in the game, and at the same time is locked in a continuous shadow fight with herself and her splinters. She is the engine of the performance, present in Tomb Raider II played live and projected in magnified form on the backdrop. But besides being virtually present on the backcloth, she is at the same time also bodily present on the stage, in multiple, for she is portrayed in this ballet by five dancers. In all her countless forms, she is simultaneously herself and the Other. And in multiple as well, because the images of the real dancers are likewise projected on the backdrop and fed into the bodily movements of the computer figure, while the real dancers give Lara a crash course in classical ballet. It is a compact training of little more than half an hour, but it makes all manner of situations possible. The dancers learn Lara's small repertoire of movements quickly, and with handstands, shooting motions and ingenious somersaults they are soon her equals. In the same manner Lara becomes skilled in a few basic movements from the classical dance repertoire, and she quickly proves adept, particularly in material from the romantic-baroque sphere. The slightly hallucinatory and metamorphosing effect shown in this dance dialogue briefly unsettles our normal perception. Living bodies and virtual objects are not always distinguishable from each other here. And because it is unclear exactly who is who, and who is imitating what and why, and the real bodies are included in a collection of virtual objects - and vice versa - you would think Life Forms and Improvisation Technologies were united in Lara and Friends in a single stage image.
The future of dance and Messiaen's music
When we see Forsythe elegantly and skilfully setting out his beautiful theory of movement - a question of inward and outward movements, of invisible objects, lines and geometric forms that represent the body - we see him playing a clever game. He does not hesitate to continually alternate master and puppet in a single role. Supported by rigid construction lines sketched in the films, he changes roles from master to puppet and the other way around, and then becomes again both at once. He not only sets out his choreographies, influenced by the ideas of Laban and the ballets of Balanchine, but at the same time you hear him announcing a still-to-be-written theory of movement.
What would that theory consist of? Lara and Friends tries to answer that, and makes clear that the dancing body of the future will be tuned in to a computer, and equipped with sensors to activate the various muscles and muscle groups. Thus it will move between its own improvisations and choreography.
But in order to properly imagine that sphere you must familiarise yourself with a very new idea concerning choreography in which many old values must be newly formulated. Naturally, original sensuality will continue to determine the power of a performance, but are we prepared yet to think, when we think of dance scoring, of Whitehead and Russell's formulations in their Principia Mathematica rather than the historic ballets of Petitpas? And that while choreography will not change immediately into a pure beta technique, it will still change into one that requires a great deal of technology? And that with the technical revolution in dance technique, not only the 'visuals' and the music, but also the bodies on the stage will possibly become 'interactive'?4
4 For the setting of a performance, Pascal Haakmat's MountPain, the image of an obstinately and creatively bleeding mountain, would be a fine candidate.
Probably in a manner which Stravinsky used in his Le Sacre du Printemps: After all, every page of his score seems 'irradiated' with choreographical-structural data by means of a note picture that in a sense also 'dances'. Stravinsky sees the notes as 'dancers' too: His musical scoring is a 'map' for musician as well as dancer. The choreographer of the future, who will feel himself above all to be a programmer, can learn something from this.5
5 A contemporary choreography concerns itself with real bodies versus 'boolean bodies', with the dancers tuned into a dance programme that is above all a neural network. Choreographical notes are thus in the form of source codes, as from a chess programme (see below). A programme, thus, that does not restrict itself to a lingua franca like Director's 'lingo' - as with lf and it - but rather registers the skeleton of a performance via a series of logical commands:
Generate moves for a piece. The moves are taken from the precalculated array nextpos/nextdir. If the board is free, next move is chosen from nextpos else from nextdir.
/
{
register short u, piece;
unsigned char far *ppos, far *pdir;
piece = board*;
ppos = nextpos+ptype***64*64+sq*64;
pdir = nextdir+ptype***64*64+sq*64;
if (piece == pawn)
{
u = ppos*; /* follow no captures thread */
if (color* == neutral)
{
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, 0, xside);
u = ppos*;
if (color* == neutral)
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, 0, xside);
}
u = pdir*; /* follow captures thread */
if (color* == xside)
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, capture, xside);
else
if (u == epsquare)
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, capture | epmask, xside);
u = pdir*;
if (color* == xside)
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, capture, xside);
else
if (u == epsquare)
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, capture | epmask, xside);
}
else
{
u = ppos*;
do
{
if (color* == neutral)
{
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, 0, xside);
u = ppos*;
}
else
{
if (color* == xside)
LinkMove (ply, sq, u, capture, xside);
u = pdir*;
}
} while (u != sq);
}
void
oveList (short int side, short int ply)
For he will have to work with 'motion capture' of the bodies and refine his movement theory in a neural network with various training algorithms.
If this sounds too futuristic, study the scoring of modern composers. If an image of the future has already been indicated, it is here. And of all those scores that seem so suited to the new dance, the modern and yet classical masterpieces of Olivier Messiaen are perhaps the most useful. If composer Thom Willems sometimes manages to suggest with Forsythe that music and dance shade into one another, that his music is generating the dance, still he remains conceptually most of all in service to it. With Messiaen things are different. His scores have much of the severity of Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky, but are at the same time schematically very closely related to a contemporary computer discipline, artificial life. And precisely because his music reflects a world of mimicked biological microcellular, evolutionary and ecological dynamics, his scores are ultimately suited to the new way of thinking about dance. The strict algorithmic feints in his music foretell the new dance, as it were. Messiaen is, avant la lettre, a master in conjuring up the form, the aura, the suggestion of the artificial insectoids that could serve as a metaphor for the new theory of movement. His scores, in which the digital and analog spheres already nestle together, as it were, are - as suggestively as Stravinsky's Le Sacre - ultimately suited to the new dance. For, while they may be one-sided and crashing on the one hand - perhaps sometimes almost too severe in their musical structures, rhythmic patterns and harmonic details - on the other, they are ultimately suitable instruments for new dancing masterpieces.6