text: from tracing image to tracing movement

For all of history humans have been trying to make sense of the world by understanding its inherent form and the medium of dance is no exception. While it was once speculated that a quinxus (a sort of an x shape), followed by a globus and any number of vital shapes; as well as plants (considering Goethe’s fixation with an Urplant being at the heart of all nature’s manifestations) choreographers since the inception of the term choreography have been devising ways to understand, choreograph and notate movement. Which is dance by means of an array of mostly linear projections in the 3 dimensional space occupied by the body. Seriously this endeavour began in the 1920’s with Rudolf Laban being one of the first and all time main proponents. Recording 3 dimensional movement for much of the history of movement notation endeavours was not a possibility so the theory developed traced with pen and paper,

Since it’s beginning photography has been a tool in capturing and mapping the course of body movement. Its first name ‘sciography’ meaning writing with shadows, so evocatively and much less statically describes the process. In contrast Forsythe’s project[1] Synchronous Object (2011), no matter how joyfully colourful, just like Merce Cunningham’s forerunning projects: Biped, Hand Drawn Spaces, Loops, Ghostcatching, has the appearance of traces of shadows of past movement. This isn’t intended, but it gives these projects an air of inherent melancholy, perhaps nostalgia. The notalgia part being incredibly at odds with the medium they are created in. Digital age and nostalgia seems anachronous but when a moment is traced, recorded, canned; and when it was a human moment that becomes transcribed into a digital one some trace of the original remains. This feels melancholic, possibly nostalgic.

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[1] ‘The web project Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced by William Forsythe is coproduced by The Forsythe Company with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and The Department of Dance at The Ohio State University’ http://www.wexarts.org/ex/forsythe/

dj.

1.

anachronous - chronologically misplaced; "English public schools are anachronistic" anachronic, anachronistic asynchronous - not synchronous; not occurring or existing at the same time or having the same period or phase

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note to self: insert cyanotype and anthropometries by Ives Klein