DANCE ENGINE

Dance Engine: a mash-up of live dance, electronic music, mobile phones, and the audience.

Beginning in 2010, Dance Engine (originally referred to as Theatre Engine) explores the synthesis of dance, technology, interactive theatre, and play. The actions and choices of each participant are an integral part of the performance creating a unique and moving experience.

Dance Engine focuses on relationship building through purposeful play; utilizing cellphones to facilitate performer-to-performer, performer-to-audience, and audience-to-audience dance exchanges. The performance goal is to lead the audience to full dance participation as a community. The technology provides a communication bridge for those hesitant to engage in partner and group activities; immersing individuals in group play by stepping them through a series of interactions with the dance performers including wordplay, imitation, drumming, controlling lights, and culminating in an invitation to move.

Dance Engine begins as a game of words and ends as a dance party for all participants.  From its inception, audience members have played multiple roles: they begin as observers, transform into performers, and culminate as contributing responders toward future iterations. This authorship has created high levels of participation and appreciation for dance.

National Performances

• Rose Wagner Performance Hall, Salt Lake City, UT (2019)
• Michigan State University (2014, 2015, 2016)
• National Dance Education Organization conference in Washington, D.C. (2016)
• St. Olaf College (2015)
• Brigham Young University (2015)
• ArtPrize, Grand Rapids MI (2015, 2017)

International Performances

• Dance and the Child International Festival, Adelaide Australia (2018)
• Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2015)

Message and Meaning in Dance Engine

Interactive performance is the ideal place to experiment with social (r)evolution.  In the performance of Dance Engine several conventions are created collaboratively between performers and audience.  In day-to-day interchanges, technology dictates the pace, format and structure of communication.  Email, text, emojis, posts, tweets; all are human messages translated and permanently on display in a digital realm.  In Dance Engine the technology facilitates human connection by focusing on prompting action, not creating the message. The concepts and rules of performance developed for Dance Engine are applicable to all places and spaces of human interaction.  Dance Engine begins as an audience of strangers and ends in a community dance party.  The obvious tools used in this performance are the mobile application, lights, music but the central principle and the one that makes this performance possible is movement.  Dance Engine uses the audience’s innate digital literacy to explore and develop dance literacy.  In dance, the audience can again explore the fluidity of identity and human connection that is so challenging in the modern world where most forms of communication have adapted to computers.

Elements of Interaction

Dance Engine contains six main sections.  Each section increases the level of audience-to-audience interaction with the goal of shifting the audience from passive observer to performer.  The sections explore the sense and the connection between words, sounds, lights and movement.

Section 1. The audience sits in chairs arranged on all sides of the edge of the stage. The dancers enter the central stage space as the house lights dim. Each audience member uses their cellphone or mobile device with the Dance Engine web application installed. As the dancers begin to move, the spotlight shines on one audience member who receives a short list of randomly chosen adjectives on their device. They select a word, and the stage lighting, music, and dancers adapt their movements to align with the word chosen. For instance, if the word heroic is chosen the music will swell, the lights will increase intensity and the dancers will move heroically. If villainous is chosen, the music will turn sinister, the lighting will grow darker and the dancers will move with villainous intent. Example words include; staccato, lethargic, saucy…etc. The dance continues and a new audience member is given a new list of words. This section is called Adjectives. 

Section 2. Tempo engages the audience in communal music making. A light shines on one audience member who receives an image of a mixer fader. When the audience member moves the fader up the tempo of the music increases, down and it decreases.  The dancers respond to the rhythm generated by the audience.

Section 3. Lights On/Off provides the audience with a chance to explore the interplay between time, motion and space by allowing them to act as lighting designers. Five audience members are randomly chosen to have control over five distinct lights indicated by the graphic of a lightswitch on their device. If they switch it on, the light turns on. Conversely, if they switch off, the light turns off. When the lights are on, the dancers are frozen but when the light is off they move to new poses, switch places, or pick up odd props.

Section 4. Call and Response, the next section brings the audience closer to movement control of the dancers. Five randomly chosen audience members have spots shine on them, with the color of each light corresponding to the color of the costume of one of the dancers. The audience member is prompted to move their device and the color-matched dancer expands on this movement, creating a cellphone duet.

Section 5. Poses invites the audience to stand up and dance. All audience members receive text-based prompts on their devices such as “Dinosaur” or “Zombie.” Eventually, these instructions become less specific, and more inclined toward group activity (such as “Two-Person Airplane” or “Swarm”). The poses move from individual, to partner, to group and end with the entire audience moving and dancing through the space.

Section 6. Puzzle shifts the authorship of the performance to the audience.  The audience is split into several groups and given general prompts such as “Follow Red.”  The lights and the music change to larger versions of the previous sections and the audience members have full control over what they do in the space.  The performance ends with a shift in lighting and the original performers standing in the seats and giving a standing ovation to the audience performers.

Dance Engine has been performed for multi-generational, multi-abled, national and international audiences.  Dance Engine has been performed on college campuses, elementary schools and internationally.  The vignettes and data collected below demonstrate the power and draw of this type of performance.  This is a story-based project, so the results are reported in stories, vignettes and moments of interaction.

Performance Lessons Learned

Performance as Training

Any performance project which invites audience participation must acknowledge and navigate the disparity in knowledge and experience between the audience and the performer.  The audience comes to the performance with no knowledge of the music, the dance, or the story.

Dance Engine leveled the playing field by creating a series of performative training steps, introducing the audience to the conventions of the performance, establishing parameters, and then shifting the audience into the role of choreographer and dancer.  To visualize this learning curve, the creative team used the metaphor of a “3-year-old on the playground.”  If a 3-year-old would not be able to grasp the concept quickly then the learning curve was too steep. It is equally important to acknowledge the disparity in skill from the perspective of the performers.  Educational and performance practices in the field of dance, art, theatre, music emphasize the refinement of skill and performance of the most perfect form of the work.  Reducing the perfection and turning control over to the audience required a great deal of vulnerability and flexibility on the part of the collaborators and creative artists.  This vulnerability was needed beyond just restructuring the performance, it was needed in each interaction and transaction.  The performers still possessed and called upon their great skill, but this skill was shared rather than performed.  This fine line was articulated as “maintain eye contact” which shifted dance and movement from performance for to performance with the audience.

No Wrong Answers

One of the biggest risks for the audience was experimenting with the world of the performance in front of other audience members.  In order to create an alliance and encourage audience members to take these risks, all the tools were very simple, and their use was open and unconstrained.  To visualize this openness to interpretation we used the metaphor of a “hammer” rather than a “drill.”  A hammer is a very simple tool but can be used for many applications, a drill is a much more complex tool with limited applications.  This project exists between audience willingness to perform in front of others and audience interest in the interaction with technology.  The audience learned how to manipulate the performance, but that learning had to occur at a pace that balanced the risk of performing poorly in front of the rest of the audience.  The performance risk decreased and enjoyment in the performance increased when the audience shifted from individual interactions to group interactions.  We adjusted the pace of the performance in terms of risk by decreasing the performative aspect of early individual interactions and upping the ante during later interactions.  Early interactions were very brief and as small as moving a finger on a phone, later interactions were large self-directed interpretations of dance in the performance space.

It is important to acknowledge that if the audience has more control, the creative artists have less.  The artform of theatre, dance, music and art are often thematically driven fields.  The audience is respected but the performance is crafted with the intention of presenting the audience with a polished product of concepts, ideas, or lessons.  If the audience is meant to have control, the creative team must have less.  The performance cannot have an end-goal, pre-determined end-result, or destination.  If the use of the tool was ambiguous, or if exploration of the tool resulted in “wrong choices” then the audience willingness to risk being engaged and exploring was be outweighed by the risk of appearing foolish in front of other audience members.  Early experiments in giving control of lighting to audience members resulted in such “wrong choices” scenarios and were abandoned.

Human Connection

The central premise of Dance Engine is to use technology as a tool to overcome the fear of performing.  Technology (mobile phones, internet, computers, etc) has changed the way that humans connect, work, and interact.  This technology has increased the speed of communication but not the accuracy or the intention.  As humans adapt more and more to this digital age, nuances of communication and connection are lost.  Dance Engine began as an exploration of human and computer interaction and asking the question, “could a mobile application help the audience transition from passive observer to active participant?”  In the process of the performance development, the creative team discovered and articulated the challenges of the small screen and the barriers that it imposes between real and meaningful human to human interaction.  The goal was to slowly help the audience abandon technologically assisted interaction in favor of real interaction.

In Dance Engine there are three simultaneous performances: the performance interaction with the phone, the performance interaction with the dancers and the performance interaction with the other audience members.  The creative team explored low-technology and high-technology methods of conducting each of those performances to examine the interference and benefit of technology in each of these interactions.  Low technology refers to paper and pencil or vocal responses with no computer interface.  High technology refers to interactions that are facilitated or created through a computer or mobile device.  All aspects of Dance Engine were successful using both low and high technology, however more audience members participated earlier in the performance using high technology.  The inverse was true towards the end of the performance, where it was necessary to use audio cues to have the audience use their phones at all and many young children abandoned their tablets entirely.

Dance is a translation of everyday movement into the extraordinary.  This project involved the skills and talents of artists in computer science, composition, choreography, and theatre.  The work of collaborators from so many different areas of exploration necessitated the development of a shared vocabulary and translating terms from one discipline to another.  This translation also extended to the audience.  The conversational messaging with the audience took the form of simple graphics and text on the phone screen.  The efficacy of this messaging drew on the ability of the audience to translate these prompts into movement.  When the audience responded to images as small screen interactions it increased the performance of engagement with the phone rather than engagement with performer or other audience member.  Message snippets that were short and open-ended created the most interesting movement.  In section 1, 2 and 3, the audience interacted with the performers through small interactions on their phones.  In Section 4 the audience interacted directly with the performers, the phone contained simple instructions of “wait” and “your turn.”  In section 5 the audience interacted directly with other audience members and the phone indicated simple verbal prompts for movement.  In the final section of Dance Engine we explored interaction of these code-snippets by splitting the audience into multiple groups and sending different messages to each group – some which suggested interaction and imitation and others that prompted independent movement.  By the end of the performance all messages were communicated through the music and the lighting to prompt changes in movement and objective.

Dance Engine was performed at Artprize a month-long multidisiplinary yearly arts festival held in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  All performances of Dance Engine in this venue were in front of a multi-generational audience.  The September 17 performance in 2015, was to an audience of 34, one of whom was less than a year old.  During the Poses section of the performance, the director decided to add the prompt “Follow the Baby.”  33 people then wiggled after the baby who clapped in delight to see everyone responding.  This moment was remarked on by audience and artists alike.  It was a uniquely community-building moment, a very human moment, created during a technology performance.  In a March 2014 performance at Brigham Young University the audience got out of their seats during Call & Response in a distanced duet with the performers.  This wild-abandon and willingness to take visible risks in front of the other audience members illustrates the pivotal moment when the phone and technology become optional to the performance.

Conclusion

The principles learned through the development and performance of Dance Engine can be applied in a variety of situations.  The rules established through rehearsal and performance can certainly be used in other interactive performances.  But they can also be easily adjusted to apply in the classroom, boardroom, or conference hall.  Dance Engine is about bringing strangers together to form a community.  The obvious tools used in Dance Engine are the mobile application, lights, music but the central principle and the one that makes this performance possible is movement.  Long before cellphones, computers, paper, and writing there was dance.

Project Development of Dance Engine

The research that eventually became Dance Engine initially began as an exploration into mobile applications, game development and theatre combined to create a new method for the audience to control media in theatre and therefore inter”act” with the action on stage.  This project uses the creative artistry of professionals from fields as diverse as choreography and computer science.  The creative team was gathered by Alison Dobbins who created the following prototype film to assist in recruiting talented collaborators.

Creative Artists on Dance Engine:

• Project Director: Alison Dobbins, Associate Professor of Theatre at Michigan State University
• Software Developer: Dr. Charles Owen, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Michigan State University
• Choreographer: Kori Wakamatsu, Associate Professor of Dance at Brigham Young University
• Lighting Designer: Michael Kraczek, Associate Professor of Theatrical Design
• Composer: Bill Sallak, Associate Professor of Audio Production, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay.
• Puzzle Composer: Ashley Heska, Freelance Artist

Dancer Toss

The first performance project in the development of Dance Engine.  Breaking the fourth wall, one cellphone at a time

Dancer Toss (2013), was presented in a typical performance setting where audience members remained seated.  Live dancers performed a choreographed piece, then ran off and on stage in response to commands from audience cellphones. The audience then tossed an image of the dancers from phone to phone and then finally back to the stage. The results of this research were published in the International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications in a paper entitled Integrating the Audience Into a Theatre Performance Using Mobile Devices, which won second place for paper presentation at the International Conference on Advancements in Mobile Computing and Multimedia, Vienna, Austria, December 2013.

Performance Dates: April 30th and May 2nd 2013
RCAH Theatre, Michigan State University