[ISEA2011] Panel: Kim Vincs – Cap­tur­ing dance and Choroe­to­pog­ra­phy: An­a­lyz­ing and Vi­su­al­iz­ing Com­plex­ity

Panel Statement

Panel: Motion Capture and Dance: what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it should never attempt

Mo­tion cap­ture pro­vides ‘snap­shots’ of the com­plex­ity of move­ment pat­tern­ing. This pre­sen­ta­tion ex­plores how this com­plex­ity can be mapped to spe­cific vari­ables for analy­sis, and what such analy­ses both re­veal and mask in re­la­tion to the chore­o­graphic prac­tices in­volved, draw­ing on my three-year col­lab­o­ra­tion with math­e­mati­cian Vicky Mak-Hau and bio­mech­anist Richard Smith at the Deakin Motion.Lab in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. The paper ex­plores how can these analy­ses can po­ten­tially drive cre­ative processes in dance, and, through a dis­cus­sion of per­for­mance pro­ject Choreoto­pog­ra­phy, how real-time mo­tion cap­ture can vi­su­al­ize and en­hance spa­tial path­ways using 3D stereo­scopic pro­jec­tion.

  • Kim Vincs is As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor of Dance and Mo­tion Cap­ture at Deakin Uni­ver­sity (AU), and Di­rec­tor of the Deakin Motion.Lab mo­tion cap­ture stu­dio and re­search cen­tre. She is a chore­o­g­ra­pher, in­ter­ac­tive artist and re­searcher spe­cial­iz­ing in de­vel­op­ing new ways of in­ves­ti­gat­ing and cre­at­ing dance using dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. Her col­lab­o­ra­tions in­te­grate sci­en­tific and artis­tic ap­proaches. She is cur­rently work­ing on ‘Cap­tur­ing Dance: using mo­tion cap­ture to en­hance the cre­ation of in­no­v­a­tive Aus­tralian dance’, a three year pro­ject, sup­ported by the Aus­tralian Re­search Coun­cil’s Dis­cov­ery pro­gram (DP0987101), which aims to iden­tify chore­o­graphic move­ment sig­na­tures using mo­tion cap­ture, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Math­e­mati­cian Vicky Mak-Hau (Deakin Uni­ver­sity) and Bio­mech­anist Richard Smith (Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney).  She also col­lab­o­rates with cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gists Kate Stevens (MARCS Au­di­tory Lab­o­ra­tory, Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Syd­ney) and Emery Schu­bert (Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales) in­ves­ti­gat­ing chore­o­graphic struc­tures and au­di­ence re­sponse.  Her chore­og­ra­phy fo­cusses on using mo­tion cap­ture and 3D stereo pro­jec­tion to en­hance the spa­tial im­pact of dance per­for­mance. Works in­clude ‘The Silk Road Pro­ject’ in 2007 with Matthew Del­bridge, QUT, ‘Aura’, 2009 with in­ter­ac­tive artist John Mc­Cormick, and ‘Choreoto­pog­ra­phy’ in De­cem­ber 2010, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with John Mc­Cormick, Daniel Skovli, Peter Divers, Rob Vincs, Deakin Uni­ver­sity’s Cen­tre for Mem­ory, Imag­i­na­tion and In­ven­tion and the Mel­bourne Bal­let Com­pany.

Full text (PDF) p. 2504-2508