The following message was posted to: dance-tech Dear all This is a slightly belated note about a project that was completed in late October 2002. The Eurodans Project was an online devising project, continuing the work that I have been undertaking since 1999. It linked 26 dance students in 10 higher education institutions across 7 European countries. As choreographic director, I worked with these dancers online from February to September. We then all came together for one week in October, in Dublin, Ireland, and rehearsed and performed for the European League of Institutes of the Arts conference. The process functioned through a combination of 'real-space' rehearsals and online collaboration. The dancers worked in small groups (generally 2-4 dancers) in their own institutions, sharing their ideas and movement on the project website. We used the new community toolbox software called Snugfit, developed by Kris Popat. Snugfit works on a templating system, so that the project director designs templates for a number of different kinds of pages, and the participants can then create their own web pages from the templates and add their own content. First we discussed the theme for the dance, and settled on 'invisible connections'. Then each of the groups created an initial movement response to that stimulus in their reherasals. They made short movies of their movement, and then used the 'rehearsal record' template to create web pages displaying the movies with text describing what they had done to create it. The dancers and I viewed all the rehearsal records, and I advised each group on how I wanted material to be developed. The dancers used each other's movies as inspirations for further work, including movements and qualities from other groups. Gradually over the eight months we selected, developed, and began to fit the movement into an overall framework for the performance structure. By the end of September, each of the groups had a range of material that was linked closely to their peers' movement, in the form of developments and variations on particular movement phrases and occasional unison phrases that all had learnt from one video. This was closely based on the traditional 'studio-based' devising approach to creating choreography. (Of course, not all groups were equally committed, and some had developed more material than others.) When we arrived in Dublin, we all had a fairly good idea of how the structure and much of the movement content would work on stage. At this point, however, we ran into issues related to performance politics and the professional acceptance of 'practice as reseach'. Because of the pressure to put on a 'professional level' performance product, I was forced to step down from the choreographic role and Wayne McGregor was brought in to 'finish off'. This was against the ethos of the research, as Wayne had not followed the process online and did not know the movement material. As a result, the rich palette of movement material was formed in a way that did not take full advantage of the possibilities and planning. This was a disappointing end to the project, but one that raises many questions that I intend to explore later in an article. However, generally the project was a success, and showed that this process can be highly effective both as a choreographic method and as a teaching tool. I am currently waiting to hear about funding for a further project taking place over a longer period to allow greater flexibility and time to develop the software further. Obviously this is a very brief account of a large project. If anyone would like more information, please feel free to contact me. There is an article about Eurodans published in the proceedings for the International Conference on ICT in Education (details below), and more papers are in the process of being written/published. There is a brief public web page at http://www.eurodans.net A very happy Christmas and peaceful New Year to all! Sita Dr. Sita Popat Research Centre for Dance School of Performance and Cultural Industries University of Leeds, Bretton Hall Campus email: s.popat@leeds.ac.uk Popat, Kris & Popat, Sita, 'Eurodans with Snugfit: Web-based community software for online choreography' in the proceedings for the International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Education, Badajoz, Spain, pp.610-614 ---------------------------------------- The Dance-Tech mailing list has recently moved to a new address. To post a message, send email to dance-tech@dancetechnology.org. To unsubscribe, send email to lists@dancetechnology.org, with the words "unsubscribe dance-tech" in the message body. ----------------------------------------
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