Exploring choreographers' conceptions of motion capture for full body interaction

ion was partially an aesthetic choice, participants were interested in the visual appearance of abstracted motion. However, there was also an interest in using more abstract representation to make available information that would not otherwise be available. For example, displaying links between two dancers in a duet: “If there are two dancers could you define with lines... the distance between the dancers” displaying “not them but the spaces between”. This kind of augmented display could display explicitly to an audience information that is implicate in the original performance. Other participants went further and considered the possibility of creating new meanings that were only possible with motion capture representations of movement. An abstract display made it possible to create forms that did not appear possible in human movement and to use performance specifically to create these forms. For example, two of the participants had performed a duet in motion capture with the specific aim of giving the appearance of a single form that combined both their movements: “we were playing with mixing up the body parts making you forget it’s a particular body part loses it’s humanity”, “I was really excited about making this hybrid creature. There were certain points where points disappeared...”. This kind of work was seen as a way of going beyond the bounds of the human body and into impossible bodies. “the imaginary body and the uncanny ... she was doing stuff that you cannot really recognise as human”. This raised the possibility of using motion capture data as a means of allowing a human performer to become inhuman: like an animal or even a seemingly random pattern. Depending on the movements of a dancer the pattern of dots could shift between states of appearing completely human to ones in which the human form dissolves. This kind of fundamental transformation could be used to invoke deeper concepts and identity than the surface images. For example, one participant described a project in which “every dancer has a kind of solo self-portrait ... a digital image which is like a representation of the self.” She saw one potential of motion capture to be to “map the unconscious into the virtual ... a print of the unconscious of the dancer”. We may therefore interpret part of the power of abstract to be that is allows performers to transcend the outward appearance of the human