Project

Practice-led research in dance

An AHRC funded two year collaborative project 2007-2009

'Relocating Choreographic Process: The impact of grid technologies and collaborative memory on practice-led research in dance'

• PI Helen Bailey, University of Bedfordshire
• Co-I D Simon Buckingham Shum, Open University
• Co-I Dr Sita Popat, University of Leeds
• Co-I Michael Daw, University of Manchester

Relocating Choreographic Process is a collaborative project involving dance and e-science researchers from the University of Bedfordshire, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, and the Open University.

It focuses on the ways in which practice-led dance research might be informed and documented by e-Science technologies, and how choreographic knowledge and sensibility can help shape e-Science practice to make its applications more usable within the field of arts research and the broader arts and humanities context.

It draws on the fluidity of concepts across the disciplines, finding synergies between e-Science’s increasing commitment to ‘experience design’ and the visual representation of spatio-temporal events, and the modes of engagement in dance that are necessarily experimental, intuitive and embodied.

e-Science tools have been used sparingly by performance artists and researchers, with projects focusing on Access Grid as a performance environment.

Works to date have made interesting use of the video windows, playing with space and time (live and pre-recorded material), and using the windows to frame the body or body parts.

The backgrounds to the windows and the surfaces on which materials are projected have also been the subject of creative attention.

Yet the inherently distributed nature of the medium has not been fully interrogated within the creative process.

This project seeks to explore the influence that this nature has upon democratic collaborative choreography. How do choreographer and dancers negotiate that paradoxical subjective position of being alone/separate yet together?