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Kinesthetics and Collective Creativity
20 March, 5-6.30, Jarman 6
Drs Virginia Pitts (Film) and Soo Hee Lee (Business) share their work on dance in different contexts.
Writing From the Body: Kinesthetics and Entrainment in Collaborative Screenplay Development - Virginia Pitts
The predominant industry mode of screenplay development involves writers sitting alone at a computer to produce numerous drafts in periodic consultation with producers, directors and script editors. The exception to this rule is the process of devising screenplays through guided actors’ improvisations. However, in the development of my film, Beat (2010), a dialogue between dramatic and choreographic improvisations was established and a process of “kinesthetic writing” evolved as a result. US-based script consultant, Joan Scheckel, employs comparable processes to develop narrative feature films collaboratively.
Based on my own film practice, interviews with Joan Scheckel, and scholarship in disciplines ranging from the arts and humanities through cognitive psychology to neuroscience, this paper employs the praxical knowledge and inductive theorising germane to practice-based research to investigate how musicality, movement and dance can be utilized in the collaborative development of narrative screenplays, and proposes that the embodiedness of human understanding evident in processes of entrainment such as kinesthetic empathy and mirroring may be harnessed to enliven scriptwriting and function more generally as a modus vivendi.
Virginia's screen production work spans drama, documentary, screendance and various hybrid forms for both film and television. Threading through her work is an exploration of how the sensory qualities of film can be harnessed to communicate with audiences. In particular, Virginia’s films explore the potential for kinesthetic empathy and haptic visuality to trigger emotional and intellectual responses via the senses. Recent scholarly research explores various forms of inter-subjective relations and the permeability of borders between mainstream and experimental or marginal cinemas. Virginia is currently developing the rhythmic structure of her next screenplay in collaboration with a composer.
Digital Dance Archives: An Interactive Design Experience for Collaboration and Creation - Soo Hee Lee
Archiving dance, in comparison to visual arts, literature or music, has always been more challenging, triggering huge intellectual debate and unease. Due to its immaterial nature, dance as the 'art of presence' makes archiving a demanding task, but also an urgent one in the fear of inevitable disappearance. Traditional dance documentation, as creating a score in order to reconstruct a dance work is often considered as limited, failing to reflect the 'liveness' of any performance. In contrast to informative and historical approaches to dance archives, choreographers such as Wayne McGregor, Emio Greco and William Forsythe have embraced digital media and interdisciplinary perspectives placing 'living archive' at the heart of the creative process. 'Living archive' as a dance archive enhanced by digital technologies is now a medium that communicates experience and enables interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographers, dancers, philosophers, cognitive scientists and human-computer interaction experts. Scholars, such as Scott deLahunta, replace mere archival information with the notion of 'resources' that consolidate knowledge, past and present experiences, while channelling interdisciplinary team working within which debates and critiques leads to new approaches of creating dance.
This talk stresses the role of digital media in archiving, which are able to enhance documentation of creative process, while paving the way to rethink, reinvent and reflect on dance practices toward new techniques, methods and approaches. As dance archives become an integral part and medium of dance creation, they are evident to what Bolter and Gromala define as 'remediation'. In particular, they are underpinned by 'transparent remediation', inserting past dance experiences, while capturing and archiving the outcome of present collaboration. In contrast to previous forms of dance archiving, they enable creative exploration and experimentation as an interactive process with digital media that leads to the discovery of new movements and ultimately new dances, a process called 'reflective remediation'. In conclusion, this talk will examine to what extent interdisciplinarity influences dance archiving and thus dance studies and research: do choreographers need to leave certain skills behind –what Richard Sennett calls 'de-skilling'– in order to develop new skills, or does interdisciplinarity broaden and push the boundaries of performance art in order to reinvent, rethink and ultimately remediate itself based on new resources that enable new perspectives to arise. Ultimately, dance archives are discussed as by-products of this interdisciplinary creative process that fuel creativity and maintain memory not just as a score, but as an interactive design experience that occurs in a given place and time.
Soo Hee Lee is Professor in Organization Studies at Kent Business School, University of Kent. He is also an adjunct professor at the GraduateSchool of Culture Technology, KAIST and a visiting professor of the Creative Design Institute, Sungkyunkwan University. He is the Director of the Creative City Forum and a Fellow of the 21st Century Foundation. He has published on science and technology policy, arts policy, design management,innovation, comparative institutions, and international business. More recently his research has explored digital convergence, remediation and collective creativity in architecture, fashion, food and contemporary dance.