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BACKGROUND
Computer technology had steadily been influencing the arts and design, had finally reached the dance domain. The possibilities now available for dance were unimaginable at the turn of the century. With the appearance of various computer programs in the 1980`s, imitating and resemble human movement - primarily developed for animation film - a whole new world had opened up for creating dance choreography too. In particular, the program Life Forms developed by Credo Multimedia in collaboration with the renowned choreographer Merce Cunningham, was a ground breaking tool for movement research.
Life Forms was the product of Dr. Tom Calvert, a computer scientist and expert for kinesiology at Simon Fraser University who began experimenting with a team of computer scientists to produce digital Laban Notation scores.
Life Forms software interface had three sections to design, edit and display animations:
the Figure Editor which provides precise controls for moving selected body parts to desired positions, the Timeline which controls the timing of a figure´s movement and synchronizes the motions of several figures, and finally the Stage which is a virtual stage to the choreography can be set in motion. (Picture 1).
The possibilities to design movement by this software were various. Nevertheless, the timing effort and roughness of the animation in an early stage of the software (Life Forms 2.0), made it only useful for sketching out movement ideas. Still it changed the possibilities to analyze and store scores of movement, using virtual avatars, modeled in the anatomy of professional dancers.
Choreographer P. Ventura created movement sequences in a computer. He created movements outside of one´s own body (or with a dancer), working without a real body. The choreographers feedback includes an experience of working from within one´s own body, feeling movements, the rhythm. Deciding, what is right is based on physical knowledge of dance techniques and intuition.
Working with a choreography software radically changed the approach towards choreography since one created movement on an avatar, working out poses and various body positions in a animation setting cues. The program works out the transitions from one pose to the next , speeding up or slowing down the movements according to designed dancer’s poses in space.
This was at the time a frustrating and time consuming work process. The users own body awareness, knowledge for movement and reflexes could not be used to generate the choreography. The interface gave no means to translate outside information to generate the avatar’s movement.
However some pre-choreographed movements of simple actions could have been set to make it easy to start with designing complex choreography. The timing, spacing and coordination of simple movements like sitting or lying down unfortunately was not available. Also these was no way of storing basic patterns of movement as a usual procedure sometimes necessary to repeat sequences.
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