Trying to understand and visualize human movement and circulation in the city and specifically in and around the area of the park of Egaleo I came up with the thought: What if we could map the city with choreographic terms and even use choreography tools to re-organize and design it?
Our daily paths in the city chart a unique map, something like a choreography "not just through the city but a process by which both our body and that of the city provisionally take form."[1] The city with its structural elements, limitations and obstacles provides 'triggers' for our use and manipulation of space, the choices we make while moving, directions, speed. Like the dancers' 'choreographic thinking'- flow of thoughts while dancing that are constantly being re-embodied in space- walking and moving within the city is a 'way to move thoughts out of representation and into action'.[2]
The planned city acts as a kind of movement prompt met by our physical body in any given instance, leading to an action encounter that re-maps the already “known” space toward a new and unique dance.[3]
The city is similar to what William Forsythe refers to as 'choreographic object'- an element outside the dancing body that suggests new dance solutions with each engagement and subsequent iteration.[4]
William Forsythe has developed a whole interactive interdisciplinary project (One Flat Thing, reproduced) developing tools to reconfigure counterpoint principles in dance-that means the field of action in which the intermittent and irregular coincidence of attributes between organisational elements produces an ordered interplay. In other words, he is trying to use choreography in order to see how potentials and organization of actions can be re-structured according to 'cues' as he calls them (aural and visual signals that trigger events).
So through years of research Synchronous Objects was developed by gathering data to discover patterns of organization of movement and visualizing it in many different ways (computer graphics, animation etc). Using the scheme 'from dance to data to objects' Synchronous Objects investigates the interlocking systems of organisation in the choreography of One Flat Thing, reproduced.[5] In the choreography there where some main themes repeated by the dancers but there were no set improvisation tasks- dancers observe each other and make these translations in real time, something that maybe lets us make use of the tools of the online interactive site for mapping the movements in the city and see how actions are connected and re-organaised by the prompts given by the city to the users and the interaction between users.
So let's take a look in some of the tools (objects)
Counterpoint tool
source:http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/CounterpointTool
WIth this tool visitors can observe the motion of multi-armed performing creatures and give them broad choreographic direction using a straightforward button-and-slider interface.[6]The creatures' motion consists of both articulated arm rotation and navigation around a virtual stage. Since the patterns are not so specific,are based on counterpoint techniques of improvisation and are letting us control the motion of the 'widgets' we could compare it to everyday life movements in the public space of the park, thus considering the park a stage. What's more, the whole choreography from which those systems where extracted is based on a grid of 20 tables letting us mentally visualize and comprehend the dimensions of the space and therefore adapt it to the real physical environment.
Video Abstraction Tool
source:http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/VideoAbstractionTool
Making the use of video to extract visualizations that help us decipher the underlying structures of human motion and the interplay between human movement and designed spaces.
Cue Visualizer
source:http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/CueVisualizer
This tool shows the collective network of communication and spatial distribution by showing the interplay of 'cues' between the performers and the fixed basis of physical space, which is the 20 tables grid.
This tool shows the collective network of communication and spatial distribution by showing the interplay of 'cues' between the performers and the fixed basis of physical space, which is the 20 tables grid.
Choreographing the city to re-map social interaction
Since I previously made the assumption that walking is an embodied mode of thinking, I believe it can 'move' human ideologies in ways that re-choreograph social registers [7]. Our bodies with their motions and gestures accumulate socioeconomical aspects defining our identities,as well as personal memories, our race, gender and so on. All these give form to how we participate in social life. Andrew Hewitt uses the term 'social choreography' to show that everyday perambulation is a mobile cartography of ideology that reconfigures the social realm.[8] Using 'choreographic thinking' as a way to describe walking considered as choreographic activity shows potentials to change the way we live and inhabit public space by re-distributing known elements and consolidated solutions to problems and changing the way we negotiate issues.Altering basic elements of walking like the posture or quality of movement, changes the sensation of motion and therefore the thinking that accompanied it. [9]. Trisha Brown with her pieces Roof Piece(1971) in which dancers passed movement like a game of telephone across the tops of buildings, and Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), which suspended a solo figure by a harness who then descended a three-story building on Wooster Street, used the city to change the relationship between bodies and forces
so that new problems arose to be solved by the dancer. These pieces importantly reveal thinking processes from both inside and outside a crisis situation, which might suggest how movement, body, and thinking work together as social choreography.
Trisha Brown's Roof Piece(1971)
(source:http://art.thehighline.org/project/trishabrown/ Courtesy of Trisha Brown)
(source:http://art.thehighline.org/project/trishabrown/ Courtesy of Trisha Brown)
Trisha Brown's Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970)
source:http://www.walkerart.org/press/browse/press-releases/2008/walker-art-center-presents-exhibition-of-tris Courtesy of Trisha Brown
Blending the tools of William Forsythe for better understanding the patters of moving within a city with the notion of social choreography as a result of embodied thinking translated in walking, we could invent strategic ways to design the city as a stage of social interaction changing the norms of its existing cartography.
References
[1] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015
[2] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015
[3] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015
[4]William Forsythe,'Choreographic Objects', http://www.williamforsythe.de/essay.html
[6] Cecilia di Chio, Applications of Evolutionary Computation: EvoApplications 2011, Torino, Italy, April 27-29, 2011, Proceedings
[7] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015
[8] Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005: 15.
[9]Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015
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