Johannes,
While I completely understand your sentiment here:
> So I partly agree with Doug, it is not helpful to think of dance &
> technology as a movement, and certainly not as a revolution or
> avant-garde. Nor is it helpful to think of it as dance. We produce
> hybrid multimedia work which in many ways may be movement-based or
> -derived. But we are n o t a minor subgenre of dance. Now, this may confuse our affiliations, which is good. But I think we
> are part of a major development during the last century to think of
> performance processes and collaborations that interweave genres and
> visualizations of ideas, conceptual matters, in movement, video, sound,
> word, design, etc., with the use of media/technologies a given, since
> they are part of the toolbox.
I think that part of the problem we face is that there is a very slippery continuum of intentions and aesthetics among the group of us who may think we
are doing similar things. What I mean is that some people may completely align themselves with dance and see their use of technology as simply a way to challenge
and extend the possibilities of movement-based imagery. Others, and your environments work seems to fall in this camp for me, are less concerned with the names
and associated aesthetics of traditional "categories" of the media that are being used, and much more concerned with collaboration and the discovery and
development of organic hybrid forms (please correct me if I am misstating this). If we find ourselves at the "dance" end of the spectrum, we invite dance critics
and a dance audience and hope to educate them about the criteria by which new media are integrated with the dancing. If, however, we see ourselves as moving
towards hybrid forms, we should probably not invite "dance" or "music" or "visual art" critics and instead begin to identify critics who are interested in the
development and aesthetics of hybrid forms. If the art is there, I suspect that these people will become more common.
The issue gets institutional and economic, though, when we recognize where we are housed (in a art department, in a dance department, etc.) and/or where
our funding comes from (dance grants, film/video grants, experimental forms grants, etc.). That is when we may catch ourselves wrestling against our own
aesthetics in the struggle to survive and thrive. But my main point here (if there is one), is that while we on this list may share many concerns, we may often
have very different intentions and definitions for our work. That is a good thing, but it also needs to be recognized within both our pragmatic and aesthetic
discourse. Kent
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