This section explains the reasons for my interest in this specific research and provides a general description of the investigation that will continue to be detailed in further sections.
I learned different contemporary dance techniques and classical, modern, and contemporary ballet during my formation and practice as a professional dancer. During this period, I had the chance to work with different choreographers and follow diverse processes of choreographic creation, so I witnessed and experienced as a dancer how to follow, develop and implement their methods and ideas to translate them into a performance.
This experience refined my choreographer's approach to guiding performers in my choreographic creations. I started questioning how to create a common ground for performers to connect besides only choreographing pre-determined dance sequences or using established methods and scores.
Since I started creating choreographic pieces with my financial resources and possibilities, slowly and throughout the years, I got the opportunity to access project funding and invitations to work at dance universities, dance companies, and even in the dance competition scene; the goals to achieve and the people's experience was distinctive back then, till now and so forth. So, I needed to create unity among the performers, regardless of their background, experience, or age differences, to construct pieces that could be linked in search of an artistic statement as a professional choreographer.
Taking this into account in guiding the creative process and ensuring that the themes and goals were always achieved, no matter the group, style, experience, or assignment, guided me to create the method I am exposing in this research.
Through the years and practice - research, The Spherical System has become a unifying experience for performers and myself, enabling me to establish a dialogue where I can tailor my choices and movements to each performer by ensuring that everyone has a common starting point to work from; meaning that, the structure The Spherical Body diagram and its activation, enables a clear framework for practitioners to operate while still considering everyone's unique abilities, creativity and needs.
In my early research, I explored the intersection between body and architecture. I came across realizing something very imperative about my practice. In an 80's journal, Postmodern Dance Postmodern Architecture Postmodernism (Copeland, 1983, p. 24), "There are only two arts -dance and architecture -. In which the term can be said to serve an unambiguously necessary function. That's because both of these arts possess a clearly defined tradition of "the modern." (in this case, modern dance and modern architecture)." [1]
I realized that the body is conceptualized in an architectural proposition in my method, which I will explain detailed in the coming sections. Furthermore, as postmodern architecture is adequate to make a human feel "at home," I intended my method to be adequate for the body of the practitioners.
Via sharing the system, it is interesting to hear testimonials from the practitioners about this method and technique and the potential to experience equality among participants, regardless of differences but commonalities. Creating a common ground, each performer can visualize themselves through the Spherical Body as equal among their peers during the creative process.
This information stays inside the work-in-progress creation between the performers and me. When the audience comes to witness my choreographies, they cannot see the origins but rather the final result, which usually has a specific story, emotion, or theme. So I started questioning the importance of creating mediums to expose this information and experience, and I decided to investigate ways to create a behind-the-scenes look choreography to stage essential elements of my praxis into a choreography that explicitly exposes the system in a step-by-step dynamic so that a broader audience can witness the origin of simple movement into intricacy.
For that, I looked up choreographers who have created methods and their ways of exhibiting them, such as William Forstye. Forsythe's ideas and body conceptualizations concerning space and movement are detailed in the E-Book Improvisation Technologies A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, developed by Nik Haffner in collaboration with American-born choreographer William Forsythe. [2]
While in Forsythe's method, the dancers learn how to move through those three-dimensional forms, suggesting the body can generate movement in relation-reflection of their surroundings or from suggested-imaginative structures. In my method, the dancer learns how to move from a three-dimensional model (The Spherical Body), suggesting the body can generate movement in relation-reflection of its preconceived architectural structure, which does not depend primarily on its surroundings but on what the body model as a device can generate.
Considering the body as a device guided me into exploring intersections between technology and dance, generating a software application in collaboration with AI software developer engineers Denise Landini and Alessandro Lambertini, where the Spherical Body diagram functions as the base of a computer algorithm to generate movement.
The use of technology and digitalization as a medium was something that I found included in The Double Skin/Double Mind Interactive Installation by Bertha Bermudez, Scott deLahunta, Marijke Hoogenboom, Chris Ziegler, Frederic Bevilacqua, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, and Barbara Meneses Gutierrez. [3]
This interactive digital installation workshop uses aspects of Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholtz's choreographic methods integrated through cameras, motion tracking, and video projections that target a general audience.
While in this installation, the practitioner's activity was physically required; the interactivity with our software was not physically demanding, but by mainly clicking and playing on touch screens and through a QR code, the audience could scan to display the "Body Sphere" Software Application on their mobile phones.
After exploring the earlier sources, I realized the need to translate my physical practice into other mediums accessible to a broader audience. This led me to delve deeper into research and development, enabling me to create materials such as text, diagrams, videos, and software to showcase The Spherical System method without attending a workshop or dance rehearsal.
The aim is to allow individuals to experience the creative process through these alternative forms of representation.
