Both, traditional dance, such as french ballet, and modern dance from contemporary dancers such as Pina Bausch’s Martha Graham and Mimi Jeong were studied in our ideation phase. All dance styles can work well or fail with interactive costumes. Some performances and choreographies succeed only with very expressive and self reflected dancers. Martha Grahams Lamentation choreography is such a piece that is shaped around one dancer and her own vision. Such ideas will most likely not very fruitful with the semi-professional dancers from Altenburg, however as we learned from the first meeting with them they are nonetheless open for creating a choreography around a costume. This means that we would give them our finalized working (prototype) costume and Dagmar the choreographer will together with her dancers create a modern dance performance. Inspirational is’Lamentation’ the work by Martha Graham who dances in relationship to a flexible tube cloth:
Furthermore the dancers of Pina Bausch in the Tanztheater Wuppertal show really well how contemporary dance can fuse with sound and music. A Guardian Article gives insight about her developments in the area of dance theater.
Mimi Jeong is the third dancer whose vision we consider fruitful for our costume design. The choreography Double U performed in the Theater Felina-Areal Mannheim is all about the liaison between two dancers. An idea that grew out of her work is the possibility to change or exchange the visualization (sonification) when dancers interact with each other.
We can see that there certainly is room for more interactive aspects in traditional and modern dance, if the dancers and choreographs are open minded and can make use out of it.
Featured image on Wikimedia Commons: Batsheva Dance Company by David Shankbone (CC BY-SA 3.0)
