On Wednesday, 22nd June, we visited the dancers’ rehearsal a second time. The days before were really busy since we needed to finish the costume prototypes. Arriving there, we were a bit nervous because the technologies did not work properly overall. We fixed cable and thread breaks until we left Weimar. Nevertheless, things worked at least partly and we were curious how the dancers would react when seeing and wearing the costumes. On-site, we video-recorded everything and conducted interviews with every single dancer who wore one of our costumes.
Starting with the distance-to-light-cape by Franzi, René and Theresa, it has been worn by Anna-Judica who danced alone for the first trial. Then a second and afterwards a third dancer joined in the performance, before another dancer (Johanna) had the chance to wear this costume. Unfortunately, we had some trouble with the distance sensors and the light patterns did not appear according to the concept behind (the closer someone else is the more lights turn on, and less lights the farer she is away).
Based on the same choreography, Annabell then tested the movment-to-light-costume by Evelyn, Marie and Lynn. Later, another dancer (Lydia) wore it while performing a different choreography. Against our concerns, the whole-body suit turned out to work more reliable than expected.
The last test was performed by Charlotte in the sonification-costume by Aline and Hauke. She had an MP3-player and wore earphones for concentrating on the sound of the prepared choreography while all the others in that room could hear the sounds generated by her movements and meant to “acoustically visualize” the dance. Unfortunately, the resistive yarn integrated into this knitted whole-body suit seemed to be broken a few hours before, so we fixed it through embedding resistive fabrics additionally. Luckyly, we then got some signals although we had some trouble regarding the auditive output on-site.