Constellation
October 11th, 2012 By some bears
This performance explores the interplay of weight and lightness to reimagine the construction of heavenly bodies as products of collaborative movement on earth. As dancers perform a set piece involving their interactions with each other on stage, a digital intervention captures traces of their position and saves them above the stage as astral objects with subtle movements of their own.
Stars are composed of the same material components as our bodies: carbon, oxygen, and metallic elements. The idea that mysterious elements of outer space arise from dancers’ movement on earth is something the audience can ponder while watching the performance unfold.
Modern dance embraces a dancer’s contact with the floor, liberated from ballet’s formal restrictions of ascension into space. Thus, contact with the earth that generates ascending digital forms is made more salient through a juxtaposition of process and product.
Technical Implementation
Dancers are outfitted in form-fitting costumes featuring spots of color at five different points on their body: on the feet/ankles, hands and pelvis. Each dancer sports a different color.
Using computer vision, a camera tracks the movement of these color groups as dancers move through space. When the dancer makes a swift upward movement, the acceleration of these points will cross a computational threshold and trigger the generation of digital forms: A projection mapped to the stage appears to throw these five points into the sky from these points on the dancer’s body.
This action generates a digital form with physical properties, allows it to move gently about the space as if it were a constellation in the night sky. Existing constellations can fade as new ones are generated from movements below.
This framework is extensible. Sound can play when constellations are generated, becoming gradually less intense as they fade. Dancers are able to generate the set for their performance as a result of set movements. Exploiting the inaccuracies of computer vision tracking, the resulting night sky appears different with every performance no matter how consistently the phrases of movement persist.
