LivingArchive: Interactive Documentation of Dance Heritage – LivingArchive

Intangible Cultural Heritage refers to traditions and living expressions such as dance, theatre and performance that have evolved for centuries, transmitted orally and from body to body. It has been adopted as an Unesco convention since 2003. Due to the nature of their transmission, these expressions are in constant threats of disappearing. Safeguarding them is of a great importance in order to preserve the richness of the embodied knowledge, practice and skills that are transmitted through them from one generation to the next.

Dance is an embodied practice that is challenging to document because dance movement encompasses a complex and tacit form of embodied knowledge. Dance is often recorded through video which results in an unimaginable quantity of dance forms now available on video streaming websites such as YouTube or Vimeo. In addition, some major dance companies use notation (Laban or Benesh) to archive their repertoires. Since the 1990s, academic researchers have experimented with technologies such as motion capture, video augmentation and interactive animation to document notable choreographers’ practices. However, these approaches present various limitations. Mere video recordings do not inform us about the intended movement qualities nor the kinaesthetic sensations in dance, among others. Formal systems such as Laban or Benesh notations are rarely used by dance artists because they require extensive training and they impose a standard language to characterize movement that practitioners resist. Finally, technologies such as motion capture and interactive animation are cumbersome and costly to deploy and thus are often not accessible to dance artists nor to the public.

In this project we envision to design accessible, flexible and adaptable interactive systems that allow practitioners to easily document their dance using their own methods and personal artifacts emphasizing their first-person perspective. We will ground our methodology in action research where we seek through long-term commitment to field work and collaboration to simultaneously contribute to knowledge in Human-Computer Interaction and to benefit the communities of practice.

We define four main goals:
- To gain an understanding on how dance practitioners document dance by collaborating with dancers, choreographers, and dance pedagogues.
- To co-design interactive systems with dance practitioners that allow them to generate interactive repositories made of self-curated heterogeneous documentation of their dance from their first-person perspective.
- To deploy interactive systems in real-world situations through long-term fieldwork that aims both at assessing the technology and at benefiting the communities of practice, exemplifying a socially relevant, collaborative, and engaged research.
- To develop methods that allow the general public to easily access and experience the dance repositories.

The project therefore will contribute concretely to the communities of dance practitioners with whom we will collaborate. It will also contribute to the academic fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Humanities. Finally, beyond dance, the project’s contributions have the potential to be applied to a large set of areas such as sports, knowledge management, pedagogy (children and adults), music and conservation.