Digital choreographies: the body as a site for gestural mapping

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a hybrid reflection on the potential of digital capture to reveal spatio-temporal choreographic negotiations between body and built environment. Acknowledging a lack of engagement within environments that account for the expressive potential of the body and which constrain, dictate and industrialize it, with the proposed somatic research we set out to conduct an observation of the performance of body behavior in the way we interact with a seminal design object: a chair. Thus, the essay is a hybrid observation of bodily performances within quotidian environments that extends choreographic practice and knowledge beyond traditional choreographic contexts to account for the expressive, playful possibilities of the sentient body. The research fluctuates between practices of choreography and design staged in the scenographic landscape of digital photography and digital animation software to map the choreo-mediation between body and object: what is performed by the body in order to ‘interact’ with the proposed choreographic frameworks of a chair. A non-linear, digital, self-ethnographic approach presents two multi-sited studies to analyze this choreomediation: from stop-motion capture of a body performing negotiations with a chair to a digital transcription as a visual mapping of a three-dimensional self-avatar, performing the techniques of sitting.