Event Title
SSA07 - From Score to Film: Reimagining the Dance of Irmgard Bartenieff
Location
CB1-105
Start Date
4-11-2017 1:45 PM
Description
This proposed performative event (a filmed performance of Schrifttanz zwei/Chinese Ballad) combines archival research, dance choreography, music composition, animation creation, and video production with the goal to highlight the place of the Arts in the archive and digital world. Four researchers across three time zones and 3000 miles, have collaborated using social media and the negotiation of four personal processes in order to reconstruct/re-imagine a dance score created in 1927 (see image) by Irmgard Bartenieff, founder of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, and a rare text by Rudolf Laban published in 1926: Choreographie. Schrifttanz Zwei builds upon two previous Digital Humanities projects conducted by the collaborators: ARTeFACT (which strives to enable the automatic recognition, tagging, and retrieval of movement-based data) and Indigo (a program developed to perform command-line stop-motion animation using Scalable Vector Graphics). Yet although Schrifttanz Zwei began as a digital humanities exercise, the reconstruction/reimagining of the 1927 score also supports the creative possibilities inherent in archival research. Thus, score, translation, transmission, and traces can be integral elements in encountering dance through its artifacts. Schrifttanz zwei is admittedly an interdisciplinary artistic collaboration, but we would argue that the production of a work of art does not preclude the use of the digital; and indeed, Schrifttanz zwei includes born-digital elements (music and animation) intertwined with the born-human components of choreography and the hard copy written/archived texts. Also, this collaboration between Digital Humanities scholars is possible because of the prior work of the collaborators as it reflects the early phases of the ARTeFACT Project and research on the production of animation from digitized musical scores (Indigo). This project is intended to create a Whole, where all voices and art forms share equal value with the supporting technologies, without privileging any one element. To accomplish this, we must negotiate within Digital Humanities AND the Arts. In fact, through this collaboration we have been made even more aware of the conversations surrounding definitions of the Digital Humanities, a topic we keep returning to during our collaboration. To wit: what is the place of the Arts in the Digital Humanities and what is required of a project to be aligned with the Digital Humanities? As DH artists as well as producers and users of digital technologies (e.g. Indigo, ARTeFACT, IDMove, etc.), we hope this performance will provoke discussion and perhaps inspire others to find ways to access other 'outlier' disciplines through collaborative activities. Finally, as this collaboration constantly reminds us: "As technology and machines consume more and more of life, perhaps theater [read: dance] can help us remember what it means to act like a human." (http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Theater-Majors-Are-Vital/235925?cid=cp79).
SSA07 - From Score to Film: Reimagining the Dance of Irmgard Bartenieff
CB1-105
This proposed performative event (a filmed performance of Schrifttanz zwei/Chinese Ballad) combines archival research, dance choreography, music composition, animation creation, and video production with the goal to highlight the place of the Arts in the archive and digital world. Four researchers across three time zones and 3000 miles, have collaborated using social media and the negotiation of four personal processes in order to reconstruct/re-imagine a dance score created in 1927 (see image) by Irmgard Bartenieff, founder of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, and a rare text by Rudolf Laban published in 1926: Choreographie.
