Dancing Dots — The Exhibition

The idea behind Dancing Dots – The Exhibition (Misgeld, Dregelid, Berchtold, and Prett 2022) is to create an augmented experience of the polska through an immersive light and sound world created as an extension of the music and dance interplay. This entails extending the social participatory dance experience into a staged dance-concert performance. As described in other parts, the movement data was captured from an earlier recording - thus, in Dancing Dots - the Exhibition, Andreas Berchtold and Ami Dregelid are dancing to, and I am playing to, renderings of our own previous performance, which are controlled live by the sound and light artist, Hadrian Prett. With the following excerpts (Videos 10–13), various approaches to performing with sonification and visualisation of movement data are illustrated. The next sections include comments from the dancers, discuss implications of performing with the static sonifications and provide additional performance documentation and details of the stage setup.

Excerpt 1: Live dancing and playing

This clip illustrates the foundation of the work in a traditional way of playing and dancing a polska. 

Through our repeated co-performances of polska and other dances, we seek a relation as parts of an ongoing conversation in an interplay where both empathic receptiveness and pronounced articulation are key ingredients. With dance and music being complementary, impulses can travel in mutual directions between sounds and movements. To that end, an artistic goal as a musician is to gain an increased sensitivity for dance movements and to continuously explore the expressive variability of the repeated patterns in the dance and the music.

Excerpt 3: Sonification, wind-feet

Excerpt 4: Sonification, svikt-overtones

The sonified data are the vertical movements of markers attached to the dancer’s upper backs — representing the dancer’s svikt, or ‘patterned libration of the body’s centre of gravity’ (Blom 1981). These data control frequency shifts in narrow bandpass filters that are tuned stepwise to overtones in recorded violin samples. In addition, bursts of shorter sounds are triggered by the crests and throughs in the vertical ‘svikt’ oscillation.

The resulting soundscape fluctuates with each beat in the three-beat cycle, embedded in an overtone-based tonality common to Nordic folk traditions that serve as a background for my fiddle improvisations. The dancers dance separately and, in their dancing, play with various metric groupings of the ongoing beat.

When playing for dancing, I am motivated to create an inviting space in the music for a dancer. The intention is that such space also becomes a space for a listener to step into, so to speak — so that it opens for listening and musical experiences outside the function of dance music. With the sonification of dance movements, this space becomes inhabited by dance sounds, and playing with these sounding movements opens new explorable spaces for playing for dance.

Comments from the dancers 

I conducted individual interviews with Berchtold and Dregelid a few weeks after each performance to gather their experiences. During the interviews, I used recordings of the performances as a reference. The interviews had a semi-structured format and included questions about how the dancers experienced the sonification and visualisations in relation to their dancing. The following quotes have been translated from Swedish. Both dancers stated that sonifications, in general, made great dance music and that they could feel the sounds as movements in their bodies. Dregelid stated: ‘I feel it in my sacrum. I can feel my pelvis turning’ (Dregelid 2022). Dregelid emphasised how the continuous, wind-like sounds generated from white noise resonated with rotation in the horizontal plane: ‘those (shhh) sounds create some really cool feeling of spinning […] and suddenly I thought about this shawl that Back-Kersti [Eriksson] wears when she dances, which sort of swings out like that!’

The dancers referred to sounds with spatial connotations, such as horizontal, with height, articulated with ‘tails’, flat or shallow shapes, and that, as compared to the live playing, the sounds emphasised specific spatial movement directions or experiences in the body, ‘it [a sonification] reinforces some dimension of something that I think is one of the parts that I get out of when you play the whole tune’ (Berchtold 2022). Dregelid also compares with music when describing a type of sonification sound: ‘They feel a bit spherical in a lovely way, but the tone starts are not as pronounced as when you play’ (Dregelid 2022). When asked in detail about the relation between mediation and dancing in the performance, Berchtold referred to ‘from the start, I recognised that it is us dancing like I’m almost dancing to myself’. He explains further: ‘I listen to it as music and with this feeling that, as I can have with music, it’s not like I hear first and do later or do first and hear later, but […] it happens together, so I place myself with the sonifications, place myself in the sound, but I hear it as music around the dance’ (Berchtold 2023).

The live interaction was also described as missing when dancing to the pre-recorded sounds. Dregelid referred to sonification sounds as ghosts: ‘So it’s a one-way communication from that ghost then. We are the only ones who should communicate with the ghost and the ghost does not communicate with us’ (Dregelid 2023). Still, the dancers expressed general excitement about how the performance allowed them to interact in the augmented setting. ‘It’s kind of fun because it’s so weird/strange and yet it’s based on you playing for real and we’re dancing our craft like for real’ (Dregelid 2022).

Performing with sonified movements

Performing to the dance sonifications required a focus on interpreting the movement sounds in relation to the underlying musical metre. A risk with adding pre-recorded sounds to a live interaction may be that the live interplay becomes redundant and that performers simply follow a pre-recorded beat before finding a mutual timing through their interplay. To avoid this scenario, we kept the volume of the sonification sounds at a level that would not overshadow the fiddle’s sound. Also, as the fiddler, I was not provided with a support monitor. The intention was to create a room for intense listening, where it would not be too obvious for the performers how to align with the pre-recorded sonifications — forcing us to actively listen, adjust and negotiate our interpretations. 

The performance (twenty minutes) featured varying combinations of sonifications and/or visualisations with live playing and dancing. With some of these, it was harder for us to locate the ‘correct’ metric beat in the sequence.  At points, we would then drift into phase-shifting the metric beat so that the sonified first beat was danced as the second beat. In discussions during rehearsals, it was decided that these moments were to be acknowledged as alternative ways of dancing to the sonification rather than failures. Considering such drifts as failures illustrates the basic preoccupation with being in time as the basis for the music–dance interaction. However, with more practice and performances, we became more and more confident in learning how to interpret the sounds with the polska metre. During both rehearsals and performance, on occasion we noticed that our joint timing had drifted against the sonifications and visualisations. These ‘failures’ were recognised as a sign that the live interaction remained the strongest tie. As a musician performing in a more static position, I could focus on the light tubes and, from time to time, used these visual stimuli to correct my alignment to the beat — which was then immediately followed by the dancers.

Further documentation of Dancing Dots performances

Dancing Dots was performed on five occasions during 2022 and 2023:

1. KMH Lilla Salen, Stockholm, 14 September 2022 (Videos 10–13).
2. FLOCK Scendansfestival, Falun, 17 September 2022 (Video 14).
3. KMH Lilla Salen, 13 December 2022.
4. R1, Reactor Hall, KTH, Stockholm 15 June 2023 (Video 15).
5. Farsta Gård, Stockholm, 17 April 2023, with only the sonification part, which the musician controlled (Video 16).

Stage setup

The stage setup for performances 1–4 placed us (dancers, musician and sound and light artist) on chairs facing inwards around a circle with a diameter of 8–10 metres, outlined by eight vertically standing Astera pixel light tubes. Four speakers were placed in corners outside the circle, projecting sound towards the centre. In addition, a subbase speaker was placed outside the circle. The sonifications were controlled using Ableton Live with Max MSP patched to Resolume, the light programme controlling the point-light visualisations displayed in the pixel light tube. These visualisations were created using the same marker movement data as the sonifications. This staging, like a conventional dance floor setting, allowed Berchtold and Dregelid to dance the polska as they would normally do, on the floor in the centre, while I, as the musician, together with the sound and light artist Prett, could visually focus on the dancers from the side. The audience was positioned outside, surrounding the circle.