PURPOSE:
To develop an appendix /glossary of digital dance terminology.
Intro:
These terms and their definitions are not in any particular order. It’s difficult to know where to start with what we should look at defining first. Do we need to define digital dance if we say it or is your interpretation of it being different than mine or another person’s ok? What common lingo do we need to at least start to share when it comes to mediating dance through different types of technologies. Oh no, I did it again. I used the pesky word ‘mediating’ in a sentence before defining it. In the words that follow don’t get too hung up on the meanings as if they are unshifting and don’t evolve over time. We propose a language centered around dance when it’s shared with others beyond our traditional and formal experience of dance on a physical stage. We do so not because we are the first, but in order to synthesize what we’ve learned experimenting with dance and technology.
Digital Dance: Really anything that involves dance being experienced with some kind of technology that augments or extends the physical experience of dance through some type of medium. That medium can be through your mobile device watching a live stream of a performance on vimeo or YouTube or Facebook or whatever application that’s hip and stable. Digital dance though doesn’t mean that we only experience dance through some type of screen like your mobile device or a virtual reality headset. How we’re using technology is to extend the human experience of dance beyond just the physical stage either before, during or after a performance.
Digital Performance : This is a very wide category filled with a range of productions. It is performance that incorporates and integrates computer technologies and techniques.[1] Performers can incorporate multimedia into any type of production whether it is live on a theatre stage or in the street. Anything as small as video recordings or a visual image classifies the production as multimedia. When the key role in a performance is the technologies, it is considered a digital performance. This can be as little as projections on a screen in front of a live audience to creating and devising a performance in an online environment to using animation and sensing software’s.[1]
Digital Stage : Here’s where things get messy really fast. When we talk about extending the experience of dance beyond the physical stage we are in fact creating new ‘places’ where dance can be experienced. Those digital stages can be streamed through your mobile device, laptop, computer or even on YouTube hooked up to Apple TV on your giant and expensive flat screen tv. You can also pop on a VR headset and watch a video of a dance filmed with a 360 degree camera. You might also point your mobile device with your camera on to a QR code and that triggers a web-based dancer that comes to life on your kitchen table or wherever your camera is pointing, bringing the performance and the stage into your own home. The digital stage can be anywhere and anytime and is no longer dependent on the exact time of a live performance on a stage depends on.
Digital Mediums: We’ve mentioned mediums already. We’ve also referred to them as portals. Your mobile device is a medium that has plenty of apps that can stream dance live or play back dance performances. We can take advantage of what different mediums offer. For example, we can offer viewers a front view (you know like when you watch dance in a theatre venue from your seat) through different types of software. You can watch dance through your television in this way, your mobile device, on Google Chrome through your computer or iPad. You can also watch dance in Virtual reality as a video in the exact same way but in VR we can also give you a different experience of dance by, say, giving you the freedom to look at the dance from different angles. Using augmented reality we can give you the audience the ability to watch the dance anywhere and place the dancers on a table or in the air, and you can watch the dance lying down or sitting. But it is not just seeing different views but creating viewpoints for the audience that would not have been possible or may not have existed without digital mediums as a partner in a live performance.
Digital Pipeline: The term comes from software development and it has been adopted for different types of live productions like dance that somehow depend on some type of technology. The pipeline is the process through which a digital dance experience is made from the beginning, which might involve choosing the medium through which the dance will be experienced, to planning the best way to capture the dancers through a camera that maybe streams that performance to Vimeo. When we use pipeline we refer to the entire process from the seed of an idea to when it is experienced by an audience member through some type of medium, and even after the experience is over, for example, if we wanted to survey the audience on their experience.
360 video: It’s important to distinguish between different types of dance that is captured in 360. The most dominant type of 360 film actually offers a point of view of 180 degrees. These short films tend to offer viewers in VR a view typical to a standard proscenium stage while the remainder of the 180 degree view (what’s behind the viewer) is blacked out. The use of 360 video in dance is rare as views behind the dancer are not as compelling. That said, there are some experiments that offer multiple perspectives of a dance as if the dance is on a circular stage and you can position yourself where you like. These tend to consist of multiple dancers performing simultaneously. While there are some live streamed dances offered these are limited by specific showtimes. Online audiences tend to watch these through typical 2D screens like a computer monitor and most people watch the performance after the fact…in other words they view a pre-recorded capture of a performance that was streamed live. Live 360 dance through a VR headset is rare and the user experience is not the best as headsets are cumbersome for long periods of time and offer limited interactive benefits. Drone dances such as the ones Small Stage experimented with offer viewers multiple angles of perspective that in some ways disrupt the typical proscenium view allowing viewers to see dance from above, beside, below and the outdoor landscape as well. These experiments allowed Small Stage audiences other ways to engage with dance during the pandemic when public events were not allowed.
Storyboarding: An active word that describes the process of telling a story. In the case of developing digital dance, use of the word storyboard can mean a lot of different things. Storyboarding a digital dance could mean developing a shot list familiar to film where the creators define specific moments during a dance that they want to depict visually. This is to help guide them to tell the story of that dance. This could mean the first shot we see the dancer far away and from the front. The second shot we see a close-up of their face, etc... Storyboarding has multiple uses and can also help us tell the story of how we want the finished dance to be experienced by an audience member. We might in that story, show an audience member walking down Robson street. Next we show someone seeing these strange and beautiful love bubbles. Out of curiosity they then walk closer to a sign that guides them to pick up their mobile device and point their camera to a QR code they have to find inside one of those sculptural bubbles. The next part of the story might depict them going to a website from their device and tapping on something that triggers a virtual dance to start up. They then see the dancer as if they are inside the love bubble.
