Relocating Choreographic Process: The impact of Grid technologies and collaborative memory on the documentation of practice-led research in dance

The Relocating Choreographic Process project provides radical new opportunities for exploring the ways in which dance, the most ephemeral of art forms, might be documented. In particular the project will take advantage of cutting edge developments in e-Science to explore new opportunities for documenting the creative process in dance making. This will provide access to activities that have remained previously inaccessible even to the practice-led researchers themselves. The project will create digital memory traces of ephemeral moments that can be archived, interrogated and reused in a range of different contexts.

Relocating Choreographic Process (RCP) is a collaborative project exploring the interplay between dance/technology and e-Science, bringing together a unique combination of researchers and software developers from the Universities of Bedfordshire, Leeds, Manchester, and the Open University. RCP focuses on the novel ways in which practice-led dance research might be documented and enhanced by videoconferencing, recording and annotation tools. In turn, RCP will investigate how choreography can improve the user experience of e-Science tools in domains other than computing. RCP will also explore transdisciplinary interests in issues such as collective sensemaking, process capture, collaborative memory, and non-linear narrative.

The project will deliver an integrated suite of software tools to enable choreographers to visually annotate video of rehearsals and performances, to plan pieces that exploit the new possibilities of networked virtual spaces over the internet, and to weave material from recordings into live performances. It seeks to explore a new form of collaborative choreography. How do choreographers and dancers negotiate the paradoxical position presented by the distributed creative environment of being separate, in different physical locations, yet together in a virtual space?

The project will conduct an extended dialogue with the dance and performance research community through a series of workshops and publications. Attention will focus on the new ways of working that a hybrid physical/virtual space both demands and enables, on advancing the artistic and technical design of the venues that are connected by video over the internet, and on commissioning new dance pieces in order to test both the new software, and the expressive and creative possibilities of this exciting new medium for performance art.