Talia Pries

Planting the seeds

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I am cultivating ways to (re)imagine the communication of the moving-body and explore new capacities for my creation of movement. These explorations of dance practice into the digital space reveal new possibilities of how the moving body transacts and is rendered as a particular mode of expression.

Something that I have been thinking about is the prompt which focuses on the ‘tasking’ movement production parts of the choreographic process by which two dancers (myself and another collaborator) are engaged in a digital duet.

In this digital duet score, two dancers are given the prompt to creatively respond to each other’s improvised movement, having one dancer as the lead mover and the other as the close tracker. While focusing on the choreographic ‘task’ at hand, the dancers are invited to make the most out of their individual space by using it as a frame. They are free to test the limitations of their improvisational score which I found to create fully physicalized dancing.

Within this score, the tracking dancer is encouraged to mirror the movement of the leader and to change what they are doing to move in chorus with the leader’s choreography while continuously moving through their own space. While being mindful of the leader’s movement, the dancer is being cautious of not completely fixing their attention on the digital screen. Instead, they must find trust in their movement and ability to mirror the other dancer which in turn creates their individual score. They are actively and curiously seeing their partner’s world in an ongoing process of tracking what is needed for a particular moment. As the following dancer is caught in this constant play of “catch up”, the mirroring movement begins to trigger a flow state which can make way for an intuitive neural network where choreographic, spatial, and design opportunities open up. The leader’s choreographic design leads the following dancer to develop an empathetic understanding for what it might be like to be in the leader’s world of the score while also shaping their own design in their specific space. This dance reveals elements of physical problem solving with each dancer, which is what dancers in the studio would normally do to generate dance content. 

While I am keeping an enhanced focus and coordination in the process, this brings up possibilities that have never occurred before and I recognize the availability for further exploration of this movement patterning potential.

While dancing in this digitally immersed environment, I’ve found that it may be construed as an embodied participatory experience, which means that the dancers are able to experience it with their whole body by moving in space. It is also a social practice between themselves and their spatial environment as well as themselves and the other dancer on the screen. This is because one dancer is moving and relating to their particular space while expressing themselves through their body to their partner. This active action and reaction between the dancers begins to create a continuous feed-back loop of movement. 

When dancers work with this score, not only are they allowing themselves to explore new methods of movement but encouraging themselves to become more aware of their own bodies within the work. This is why experiencing dance and choreographic tasking in a virtual environment within an interactive application is an embodied experience, whereby the role of the participant (leader and tracker) is central to choreographing and activating the dance. 

As I engage with this simple yet effectively creative process through online platforms, I am wondering how I am simultaneously researcher, innovator, and body–stretching my skills within these new stages for dance crafting.

I plan to be engaged in this duet with the partner now being myself.. Tracking my movement, finding new pathways, and exploring the ways in which the movement can be translated into a film.

What will that look like…?