In a nondescript concrete soundstage nestled between classrooms at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, three dancers are leaping, embracing, lifting and lunging their way through a routine against the backdrop of an unadorned wall.
But for audience members tuning in on Internet2, the sight is quite different. The onscreen stage is set with digital props -- moving visions of city streets, flea market stands and World Trade Center rubble. Live images of the dancers are interspersed with the film. At times they seem to sashay through the streets and float above the debris before slipping offstage, which in this case is any place a camera is not.
Slowly but surely, the ancient art of dance has gone digital.
Choreographers are using software to create their pieces. Working with video-conferencing, video-editing, and motion-capture techniques, academics and dance companies are transforming the stage from a physical space into something that can exist in many places at once -- a specialty known as telematics. With elaborate "wearables" and sensor-equipped stages, they've endowed physical movement itself with new dimensions and properties such as sound.
If the connection between dance and technology is not immediately apparent to you, rest assured you're in good company. Dance, after all, is a medium that uses the physical body as an instrument, while technology by definition is once-removed from the natural body.
"There are some people who would call the idea of mediating the human body with technology sacrilegious," says Mark Coniglio, co-founder of Troika Ranch, a Brooklyn dance company that has pioneered the use of technology in performance. Indeed, traditionalists aren't likely to warm to a fully wired dancer or a tap-dancing robot.
But for people like Coniglio, the need to bring the two worlds together was obvious -- technology could make the body move in ways it never could on its own. Performances would no longer be limited by stages. Audiences could be introduced to new ways of enjoying and seeing dance.
To this end, Coniglio created the Midi Dancer, a wireless contraption that, when worn, generates sounds activated by the wearer's movements.
John Mitchell, director of the Dance Multimedia Learning Center at Arizona State University, developed an interactive stage equipped with motion sensors that set off various audio-visual events when a dancer crosses their path.
Carol Hess, chair of UMBC's dance department and choreographer of the performance described at the beginning of this article, uses video to play with the audience's focus -- for example, a close-up of a dancer's tensed muscles will appear on a screen behind the dancer -- or simply to become the stage itself, as in the streaming performances.
The very notion of what constitutes a dancer is now up for grabs, as choreographer Doug Hamby proved when he collaborated with UMBC engineering professor Tony Farquhar to choreograph a six-legged robot named Maurice Tombé.
Until recently, only a few dance-world oddballs scattered around the globe mixed dance with technology.
"In the beginning, people thought we were crazy," ASU's Mitchell says. "There was a following. It was very much underground, a very small group of people around the world doing it. It's really blossomed now. It has to be because the world has changed."
"In a sense," echoes Johannes Birringer, a choreographer and multimedia artist who directs Ohio State University's dance and technology programs, "the analog world has shifted into the digital world, so it became a natural progression for me to explore the potential for new media language, new digital technologies and their place in art."
Indeed, in the late 1990s, as universities pressured all departments to become technologically with-it, dance academics began realizing that high-tech was to become integral to their work whether they liked it or not.
"We had a big dance and technology festival here in 1999," Mitchell says. "I felt that was a watershed year. The big difference was that dance administrators came to that conference and they all wanted to know about integrating technology into their programs. Previous dance and technology conferences had been fairly small, a hundred people; this was like 500."
It certainly didn't hurt that some big names also got into the act early on. As far back as 1991, acclaimed choreographer Merce Cunningham was using the choreography software Life Forms to create his pieces. In 1997 Mikhail Baryshnikov performed Heartbeat, a dance that used technology developed at MIT to amplify the Russian dancer's heartbeat so the audience could hear it as he performed.
Today, graduate students at Ohio State can obtain an MFA in Dance and Technology, and dance departments increasingly are teaching motion capture and video-editing skills alongside movement and choreography. The Association for Dance and Performance Telematics (ADAPT), a consortium of five universities, now meets regularly via Web conference to further exploration of performance and choreography via the Internet.
A small marketplace for dance-related software such as Life Forms and OSU's LabanWriter dance notation software has sprung up as well. Coniglio's Isadora software, which facilitates real-timevideo manipulation, is also popular.
Dance companies like Troika Ranch and Capacitor, which are pioneering technology as medium and subject through performance, are growing in popularity.
And audiences, already accustomed to technology's influence over nearly every aspect of their lives, seem primed to accept dance's dramatic transformation from a kinetic, physical medium to something less tangible but rich with new possibilities.
