Rachel BoggiaRachel
Boggia

Meta-Academy@Bates 2013: Minded Motion Lab

The first pilot for Meta-Academy, entitled ”Meta-Academy@Bates 2013: Minded Motion Lab“ focused on collaborating with master dance improvisation teacher Nancy Stark Smith to translate elements of her Underscore to the online space.  Over three weeks, we asked the question, “What does a collaborative, embodied practice like the Underscore look and feel like if transposed to the internet with all its connective, social, visual, remixing and re-sampling capabilities?”

What follows is an outline of the core content of the lab.  All course activities can be viewed and tried at the original lab site here.  For a narrative approach to understanding this Meta-Academy pilot, read my blog post for the Bates Dance Festival Artist Blog.

Central Video

Meta-Academy@Bates 2013: Minded Motion Lab featured creative activities and critical investigations that branched out from a central video interview in which Nancy Stark Smith describes and discusses the Underscore in detail. Significantly, this is the first time Stark Smith shared/taught the full underscore online.

We asked participants to “tag” the video by writing keywords as they watched. Then we asked them to make word clouds of their tags through the website wordle.com

Here are a few of the many word clouds created. See all the responses here.

Resource Commons

Nancy Stark Smith helped us start a collaborative resource commons of articles and videos. Other scholars and lab participants added to the bibliography.

Embodied Activities

Each week, we posted a video of Nancy Stark Smith teaching an improvisational dance skill translated for the internet.  We asked participants to respond creatively to embodied activity. Links to all three embodied activities with student responses can be found here.

Embodied Activity #1

Assignment and all student responses to Embodied activity #1 (scroll down on page )

Embodied Activity #2

Assignment and all student responses to Embodied activity #2

A participant’s response to the Embodied activity #2

Embodied Activity #3

Assignment and all student responses to Embodied activity #3

A participants response to Embodied activity #3

Online Creative Investigations

Examples are collaborative tagging (see core video above) mind mapping, online video editing, thick video editing, and collaborative drawing.

Online synchronous video encounters (video chats) in which participants talked and danced together online

Guest lectures in google+ hangouts became active conversations between Nancy Stark Smith, lab participants and researchers on subjects ranging from neuroscience, philosophy, dance and technology, dance notation and the history of contact.  Guest lecturers included:

Threaded Discussions

Participants and Outcomes

66 participants from four continents collaborated in the lab with zeal and creativity. Many were dancers, some BDF alumni, some students of Nancy’s, but some were researchers in other fields.

They reported increased understanding of the Underscore, digital literacy, creative connections with others across the world, and finding new nuances on the experience of embodiment in relation to the computer interface, their creative work and theoretical approximations.  More than 20 hours of video content were created, as well as writing, images, and other forms of creative and critical output. All activities and outcomes can be seen (and tried) at http://www.dance-tech.net/group/meta-academy-bates-2013

Fascinating questions about embodiment, cognitive processes, creativity, presence, mediation and collaboration on the internet arose, as is evidenced by the comment of project participant, Adriano Bittar of Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil: “The interactions that happened significantly changed my perception of embodiment as I could be guided by and dance with others through the space created.”

Participants continue collaborating in partnerships that were formed by Meta-Academy, for example, the collaboration of Daniel Pinheiro of Porto, Portugal and Lisa Parra of New York, New York, USA. Lisa’s comment on the discussion thread shows the impact of the pilot on her artistry. “Meta-Academy inspired me to rethink ideas of place, language, identity, culture and time within the context of communication and embodiment.  The rethinking and questioning is an ongoing investigation/collaboration that Daniel Pinheiro and I began while doing the duet/trio exercises of Nancy Stark Smiths’ Underscores.  The experience of the study and my encounter with Daniel has been wonderful and I look forward to sharing our work/collaboration with this community as it continues to develop…”

Barrios Solano, Dorado, and I organized an open lab/gallery showing of works at the conclusion of the Bates Dance Festival, which was met with interest and enthusiasm.

In addition to positive feedback from lab participants and the Bates Dance Festival community, we have received enthusiastic response from the field.  Meta-Academy is featured in the Winter 2014 Edition of Contact Quarterly and on the Bates Dance Festival Blog, and we are developing a Meta-Academy Lab on Choreographic Thinking in collaboration with HZT Berlin.  We are also in conversation with internationally recognized improvisation teacher and Smith College Assistant Professor of Dance Chris Aiken to create a Lab around his teaching at the Bates Dance Festival in 2014.  We presented our research as part of the “Community of Practice” in choreographic documentation at Motion Bank Live and On Line (L.O.L) 2013 in Frankfurt, Germany in November, 2013. This was a significant honor, as Motion Bank is one of the premier centers of research on choreographic documentation in the world.