Design
Women and men are not allowed to dance in public in Iran. Their expressive freedom is severely limited by this rule. So when Iranian performance artist Ava Ansari moved to New York she produced a short video as a response to this restriction, called "Dancing by Myself in Public." In the video, she dances freely, announced, and uninterrupted in New York's Times Square subway station. In her homeland, this behavior would be very dangerous and most likely penalized.
Using this as an artistic seed, we designed a digital extension for the original performance. Ava's original intention was to share the dance with Iranian publicly. But it is still dangerous to dance in public in Iran. Thus, instead of trying to directly recreate the same dance, we used mobile digital media to transform the production of the dance itself. The goal was to build a dialog between American and Iranian people for a shared visual movement performance.
First, we rotoscoped and abstracted a section of her dance into a discrete series of static image overlays.
Then, we created an app which takes these frames as visual guides and randomly assigns them to unique, yet anonymous users. The Android application is freely available and allows others to participate in the project. Participants can download the app and receive a number of movement shapes that are overlaid over their smartphone's camera view.
These participants can use the frame as an overlay within the app's camera to reenact single frames of the dance. In that way, anybody can locally re-enact still poses of the dance without factually dancing. They can contribute to the dance without endangering themselves in restrictive countries. The app stores these frames, and the "static dancers" can drop their resulting images back off to us. The frames are re-assembled into their original order, from which a new dance emerges. It is a combination of the original dance in New York and the many different poses re-enacted in numerous public spaces by local contributors. The mediated dance is situated in a new public space.
All movements have joined together with the digital tool to permit a shared expression.
In addition, participants can "freestyle" and contribute completely new poses to the project. These new poses will later be used to develop a new dance performance by Ava Ansari. The idea is to facilitate a visual and movement based dialog through digital media.
Andrew Quitmeyer and Michael Nitsche from Georgia Tech's Digital World and Image group worked with Ava to come up with a concept for sharing and expressing her dance in the target country. We used other members of the lab for critiques on the design, and also to conduct preliminary field tests. Over several iterations Andrew crafted the underlying app.
In July 2012 we finished the collection of the re-enacted stills and have received the still frames from many brave Iranian contributors. Their images have been re-assembled to form a new dance moving image and we are preparing the final video for a release.