Workshop HZT Channel4 / InKüLe:

Motionbank-- Traces of Time

Documenting dance and choreographic process digitally

David Rittershaus

When: Saturday, 14. October 2023, 10:00-17:00

Where: HZT Uferstudio 3; Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT), Uferstraße 23, 13357 Berlin

Registration for UdK-students: 

send an e-mail to david.rittershaus@hs-mainz.de & inkuele@intra.udk-berlin.de - please state your course of study

The workshop will explore various forms of digital dance documentation mainly focusing on their use within creation processes and artistic research. Although the emphasis is on dance and choreographic work, many aspects considered within the workshop will be applicable to other areas of the performing arts, especially when movement is involved.

As a starting point, we will look at some documentation projects from the last decades that have used digital technologies and media to record, archive, transmit and disseminate dance and choreographic work. 

However, the focus of the workshop is on hands-on experimentation with digital documentation methods and tools. We will explore a web-based software that originally emerged from the rehearsals of the Forsythe Company in Frankfurt and is now being further developed by Motion Bank. The software not only enables a specific, collaborative form of documentation during ongoing rehearsals or performances, it also allows for the collection, linking, annotation, and sharing of various media in collaboration with a group of people across the web. In addition, the tool can extract bodily movement from video clips, similar to what motion capture systems do. It therefore allows us to consider and compare different forms of digital documentation of dance, movement, and creative processes exemplarily, and to discuss their value for artistic production and research as well as for archiving and dissemination projects.

Participants are invited to bring already existing video recordings from their own projects (plus additionally pictures, audio recordings etc.). Within the context of the workshop, recordings of work-in-progress are of specific interest. If there is no such material, this is not a problem, as we will not only work with existing material, but also do on-site recordings of task-based movement and improvisation exercises.

David Rittershaus is a dance and theater scholar with #vortanz and Motion Bank at Hochschule Mainz, a project originally initiated by the choreographer William Forsythe. In cooperation with a range of partners, Motion Bank is developing low-threshold, standard-compliant open source and free systems designed for use in a variety of contexts, including dance education, creation, research and archiving. Experimental software development and user interface design are tightly coupled with methodological research in the domain of dance practice and theoretical reflections from the field of dance studies.