Physical Beats

Utilizing Object Oriented Ontology, my current work Physical Beats, interrogates my phenomenological attitudes and my spectator’s aesthetic interpretations, values, and preferences in dance practice, performance, and development. I explore how performances resistant to fixed representations shift ideological perspectives, widening aesthetic representations. Ultimately, my research challenges the spectator’s gaze, transcending their trained perspectives.

Physical Beats is a phenomenological study of imperceptible mutabilities in dance studies that establishes a new sound dance movement practice via Object-Oriented Ontology. Employing the unconscious collaborative efforts of matter transformation (Oobleck), sound vibrations, and media to investigate the mimetic behavior of dancing objects and human dancers, this movement practice advances the art of choreographic expression and dance making as well as enriches dance spectatorship. Phenomenology is the study of how objects are perceived by subjects rather than what they are. The Oobleck supersedes its physical description as matter transformation and takes the shape of a movement practice via its kinesthetic and auditory responses to human manipulations. While I sought to make the Oobleck dance to music the way a human dancer would, I realized, as a non-human dancer, its function will only allow it to dance to vibrating sounds. The only way to capture this is to video the Oobleck’s reaction to vibrating sounds above 30hz, then add music to the video that represents mimicry of the Oobleck dancing to music rather than vibrations. Phase 1 of Physical Beats illustrates these efforts. My purpose for this phase was to provide the illusion of music visualization through the representation of matter transformation re-presenting the musicality of human dancing bodies.

 

Influenced by Merce Cunningham’s and Steve Paxton’s “Chance” dance methods, my work asks: Do objects dance? When anthropomorphized, objects resemble living bodies, are they now viable subjects for study? If the human mimics the object does this grant the object agency? Is it possible for the objects and human dancers to exist as both choreographers and performers? My expectations of the Oobleck’s performances are limited since it autonomously choreographs its own kinesthetic responses. This reality makes the Oobleck simultaneously anthropomorphic and mimetic. The challenges with this mode of production are often in communicating its aesthetic merit. Ideology, however, as the stronghold that affects phenomenology, oftentimes overlooks the existence of aesthetics across mediums.

 

This project requires four phases: the first phase—music visualization, illustrated by matter transformation reacting to vibrations above 30hz; the second phase—a human dancer’s mimetic representation of the matter transformation in a unison performance; the third phase—applies the technology of a movement capturing device (MYO) worn by the human dancing subject acting as an embodied remote control triggering the volume levels controlling the Oobleck’s reaction to vibrations shifting between 30hz and 60hz+, creating a call and response interaction between object and human. This performance, like phase 2, will be projected on a backdrop accompanying the human dancer on stage. My methodology depends on the efficacy of semiosis and mimesis intersecting to originate an approach to dance making that is phenomenologically driven. The fourth phase of this project imagines a collaborative performance with the dancing Oobleck (object) and a company of dancers (human subjects) who will more closely resemble the object than the object does the human subjects, generating imperceptible mutabilities. The rhetorical interaction that will be generated between the human subjects and the object, by the human subjects is the spectacle. What you dance and why you dance it, is the medium for the rhetoric of interaction that is potentially a new way of thinking about human world interactions and our aesthetic interpretations of these interactions. The through line I see emerging makes the following connections, non-human representations of humans challenges the assumption that objects and their orientations are mutually exclusive of human imitation and or embodiment. Ultimately, my work seeks to advance the phenomenological awareness of dance beyond the spectatorship of human bodily movement.