We all know the “chicken and egg” dilemma. This season's DanceTech challenges audiences with a new question: “Did the music or the movement come first?”
There are 7 new choreographic works in DanceTech 2023 and one of them will feature motion-tracking technology—using the movement of the dancer or dancers on stage to manipulate the music track. Simply put, dancers influence sound with gestures.
When Dr. Justin Houser was invited to be the guest artist sound designer for DanceTech, he wanted to explore as many opportunities related to his background and compositional style as possible; for example, he composed music for choreographer Melissa Brading and edited and expanded music tracks for choreographer Kyla Olson. Dr. Houser, who felt he could contribute even more to the production, floated the idea of introducing audiences to a form of motion-tracking technology that would not require expensive equipment or arduous setup.
“I like flipping things on their heads,” said Houser.
Dr. Houser's piece “Ghost Dance” uses a webcam to pick up a specific color—in this case, red—worn by the dancer and is analyzed in a software like data. As the dancer moves left or right on the frame, the music track loaded into the software will scrub left or right (think radio dial). An audio filter attached to the track will raise or lower in intensity based on the dancer's position in the frame. And as the dancer moves nearer to or further from the camera, the depth of the scrub will expand or contract like the zoom on a camera.
All of this is done is real-time, without delay.
Confused? This demo video from Dr. Houser should help clear things up.
Dr. Houser first heard about motion-tracking technology more than 10 years ago while watching a TED Talk with Imogen Heap, the Grammy Award-winning artist who composed the music for the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and developed a line of musical gloves called Mi.Mu Gloves.
When completing the Fine Arts Doctoral Program in Music at Texas Tech in 2014, a portion of Dr. Houser's dissertation was influenced by Heap's work and included a solo dance piece that used Xbox Kinetic technology to control sound using the motion of the dancer.
Watch this demonstration from 2014.
This spring, Dr. Houser is teaching a graduate-level course in the School of Theatre & Dance called Experiments in Interdisciplinary Arts, where students are learning to integrate the Max/MSP software, the same software he is using in DanceTech, into their interdisciplinary art-making.
According to Dr. Houser, the software is an interdisciplinary tool and useful across multiple industries and media, from music and sound to video and animation. He enjoys watching students discover what they can do when they dive into the vast world the software offers.
For Cody Blythe, a fourth year BFA dance student and dancer/choreographer for “Ghost Dance,” that discovery began in their first rehearsal when she, through her movements, began to play with the music.
She says audiences can expect something new from her in each performance of DanceTech, because depending on what the camera picks up, the music will change. But unlike with traditional choreography, which sometimes may trip up a dancer trying to remember the next step, Blythe finds a certain amount of ease and freedom with this:
“Once I get moving and start dancing, it's comforting for me because I can just trust my body, trust my movement, and not worry about what steps come next.”
DanceTech 2023 runs March 2-4 in The CH Foundation The Legacy of Christine DeVitt Black Box Theatre. Tickets are $15 for individuals and $5 for students. A limited number of free student tickets will be given away before each performance. More information can be found online.
Justin Houser, PhD, is an academic advisor is the College of Arts & Sciences. You can listen to his albums here and here. You can also watch a demonstration of a drum system he developed for a performance last summer here.