Title: Dancing interactions
Performative notions of technology and it's design tend to rest on metaphor of the
script (Akrich, 1992), and hence any move to conceptualise interaction design as a form
of choreography (Suchman, 2009; Cussins) inadvertently incorporates a textual
imperative. A focus on dance as performance, and an investment in dance as interaction,
provides means of moving from an inference of textual (re)presentation to one of
kine(a)thetics, a refiguring that foregrounds the fluid, dynamic and creative moments of
interaction and provides alternative resources for interaction design. What follows is a
preliminary thought piece born of the author's reengagement with his early life as a
ballroom dance teacher and the prejudices that brings.
This paper is concerned to engage with efforts to incorporate dance as performative
theatre by advocating an understanding based on social interaction. And to apply this
new emphasis to discussions of methodology and epistemology. The key turn is from
‘dance performance’ as observed professional activity, to it being a form of relational
intimacy in social activity. As such it is premised upon Schechner’s (1988) continuum of
performance that extends across the liminal apron of the stage and reaches into the
audience’s life. Dancing a part, becomes dancing together, becomes social intimacy. As a
consequence the paper not only connects performance studies and the social sciences,
but also bridges and combines sociological and social psychological concerns about
identity, meaning and movement.
To accomplish this we draw on Conquergood’s (1992) tripartite structure of ‘memesis’,
‘poiesis’ and ‘kinesis’ and apply each term first to dance as performance (performance
dance), and then to dance as interaction (social dancing). Our wish being to extend
performative conceptions to social behaviours. By doing so we will inform a productive
conceptual topology that understands the social as informed by the theatrical.
The anthropologist Dwight Conquergood from North Western University draws
together performance theory and social anthropology, by detailing a ‘critical genealogy’
of performance,
“This critical genealogy can be traced from performance as mimesis to poeisis to kinesis,
performance as imitation, construction, dynamism” (Conquergood, 1992, p. 83-4).
Memesis, for Conquergood is best expressed in the Goffman’s dramaturgical approach
in which issues of authentic replication of roles and behaviours are key. Poeisis draws on
the work of Victor Turner and the anthropology of ‘social dramas’, which reveals the
ritualistic creation of society. Finally, for Conquergood kinesis is “a decentering agency
of movement, intervention, transformation, struggle, and change” (Conquergood, 1992
p. 84) and ‘movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that
transgress boundaries and trouble closure’ (1995, p.139).
Conquergood was talking about the potential inherent in performance to move from
mere mimicry (mimesis) to transgressive events (kinesis), and in so doing mark a
movement away from Goffman, towards such authors as Judith Butler and Homi K.
Bhabha.
We use this Conquergood’s formulation of ‘mimesis, poiesis, kinesis’ to draw out
distinctions between performance dance and social dance, but in so doing we move back
toward’s Goffman’s emphasis on the interactional. Our argument being that mimesis,
poiesis and kinesis are qualities of any form of behaviour, rather than strategic
developments of an art.
Dance as performance and interaction
There is a growing literature on dance and choreographic theory (e.g. Fledderjohn, H.
& Sewickley, J., (1993). This is centred upon dance as a skilled professional activity, a
craft, a discipline etc. It is normally concerned with forms of action research wherein
dance choreography and production are forms of applied research. The researcher is
often a choreographer or dancer themselves and the applied research involves intimacy
embodied practice. Insight, and by extension theory, are borne of a desire to engage
with fleshy, emotional, and physical humans in all their glory. The theatre theorist Ross
Gibson (1999) speaks of the intimate relations between stage actor and audience
member by saying the second ‘imbibes the breath’ of the first.
There is a willingness in areas of performance theory to connect through from
professional expertise and activity to everyday instances of dance. Performance studies,
for example, incorporates anthropological insight into its analysis of ritualistic practice
as social drama (Turner, 1986). Yet in terms of social interaction there is little interest
in observing the details of dance as forms of communicative and performative behaviour
in social contexts. Put simply, we have forgotten Goffman’s advocacy of the everyday
interaction and intricate mundane matters. This paper is an attempt to bring
performance (and dance) back to its sociological roots.
The audience interacts with the performers, it’s true, however dance is a form of social
ritual that involves ordinary non-professionals interacting with each other. There was a
time when being able to dance was a mark of social competence, an indication of likely
romantic success, at the very least a means to avoid social embarrassment. An
alternative then is to focus on social dance, or dance as social interaction.
Performance dance as mimesis
The ‘Dancing the data’ project combines ethnographic research into special education
needs with performance dance. In the book of the same name (Bagley and Cancienne,
2002), text articles are accompanied by video excerpts (on an accompanying CD). In
‘Educational Research and Intertextual Forms of (re)presentation’ the editors detail the
strategy of the first video,
“In terms of choreography I decided that interpretation would tend toward the ‘literal’
and ‘more obvious’ rather than the aesthetic and more avant-garde - the use of
movement to (re)present data being sufficiently innovative and pioneering” (p.7). The
dance is seen as an embodied expression of the research insight.
In the choreographer Bill T Jones’ production ‘Still here’, the dance performance is a
product of a series of workshops with those with terminal illnesses, in which nondancers express their feelings through particularised body movements. For example one
participant expresses her concerns by brushing her open palms up the side her ears,
squeezing her head, while contorting her features into an anguished squint. Jones
captures the movement in the workshop by mimicking the participant and replaying the
expressive embodied ensemble back to them. In this way he remembers and captures the
‘emotion’ and its expressive form. He then teaches these movements to a dance troupe
as a choreographic segment.
Both ‘Dancing the data’ and ‘Still here’ employ mimesis. However each chooses a
different moment of ‘re-presentation’. For Bagley and Cancienne (2002) the performance
dance represents the data, the dance is afforded by the creative translation by the
choreographer. With ‘Still here’, this translation is carried out by the participant, and
the choreographer is first a stenographer and only later arranges these expressive
ensemble segments into a larger framework.
The distinction is key to an issue of researcher power and ultimately ethical strategy.
The question being ‘who’s performance is re-presented?’ and ‘What right does the
researcher have to talk on behalf of others?’
Performance dance as poiesis
The combination of participant expressive ensembles in Bill T Jones’ ‘Still/Here’ to
form a stage performance, and the enacting of that performance in a venue is itself
poietic. The ‘performance’ is a new behavioural artefact that didn’t exist before. That it
is born of the syntactic construction of workshop participant behaviours is clear, but the
meaning and illocutionary (and perlocutionary) force of the resulting artefact (itself of
course an ensemble or assemblage of elements) is new.
Victor Turner is famed for providing the expression ‘making not faking’ as an epithet
for poeisis (Turner 1986). What he had in mind was the notion of artifice that imbues
mimesis with distance and mistrust. Just as the sociologist Erving Goffman’s
dramaturgical approach to society was criticised for suggesting the continual
manipulation of others, so mimetic performative practice is critiqued for the opportunity
for assertions of deliberate manipulation, accidental distortion and transformative
omissions. An emphasis on poiesis on the other hand dispenses with a ‘true’ original and
instead commits only to the expressive intent of the situated activity.
For Turner the ‘social drama’ has wider ramifications. Each poietic act combines to form
a ‘way of life’, understandable as rituals that structure cyclical process. In addition each
act is itself a moment of passage, a moment of liminality, in and through which
transformations occur. The performance dance as artefact is not only constitutive it is
also potentially transformative. Poiesis contains both these meanings, it is both
structuring and constitutive; it accounts for the emergent and iterative processes of
continual social genesis. It is captured in Garfinkel’s “quiddity of immortal ordinary
society” (1988).
Performance dance as kinesis
Ultimately Jones’ ‘Still Here’ is a form of kinesis. Confronted by the portrayal of
abstract bodily expressions of the emotions of those coping and living with illness
cannot help but interrogate the sensibilities of the audience. Secondary exposition, such
as the documentary by Bill Moyers (Grubin & Moyers, 2007) informs further discussion
and wider distribution and effect.
Social Dancing as mimesis, poiesis and kinesis
The waltz as mimesis occurs early in the process of learning the dance. It is typical for a
beginners’ ballroom dance class to start with all the pupils in a line and the teacher
standing in front with their back to the pupils. Through a combination of verbal
direction and physical movement, the teacher ‘shows’ the steps to the class; while the
pupils mimic and imitate the bodily movements of the teacher.
“right foot forward, left foot to the side and slightly forward on the ball of the foot;
transfer your weight as you raise body; draw the right foot toward the left, bringing the
feet together on the balls of the feet”
At first the class does the steps ‘with’ the teacher; then the teacher watches as the class
repeats them. Through corrective displays and repeated exposition instruction, the class
learn the dance (Keevallik (2010) calls this ‘bodily quoting’). Interaction is initially then
between the pupil and the teacher and involves not only the learning of the steps and
bodily movements but also the acquisition of the skill of body matching. In other words,
learning to reflect on one’s own movements in relation to another’s movement is a key
component of the learning process. A second form of interaction comes with the
addition of the music. Learning to ‘hear’ and ‘respond’ to the phraseology of the music
takes precedence over ‘footwork’. Interaction with the music is less about sequential
conversation (‘turns at talk’) and more a form of synchronised overlap, wherein musical
bars combine with movement phrases and. Person and music work in concert and
consort to complement each other. The dance as produced artefact takes on a
rhythmicitiy (Maier, 1992) akin to the space-time geographies of Hagerstrand (1985)
and Lefebbre (2004).
Body matching is key to the dance partnership:
“forward, side, together” meets
“back, side, together”.
Like the march, the waltz consists of movement in unison, instigated by the ‘beat’ of the
movement. Unlike the march the waltz involves in some ways a form of mirroring.
Forward, begets backward, side to the left begets side to the right. Initially the instinct
is to mirror other aspects such as head position and ‘hold’ (specifically where the hands
are place) , and so the teacher has to point to the inconsistencies in the mirroring rule
(later certain moves will decidedly break with the notion of mirroring altogether with
the distinction of ‘in hold’ and ‘out of hold’ movements).
Body matching is then transferred to the ongoing integration of the two bodies.
Synchronisation is effected by the ‘measure’ of the music (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 10) that
combines quantitative and qualitative, the mechanical and organic, the cyclical and the
fluid (ibid). For Lefebvre, these contrast combine with repetition and difference to
characterise the paradox at the centre of a rhythmic characterisation of life,
“Rhythm appears as regulated time, governed by rational laws, but in contact with what
is least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body” (Lefebvre, 2004, p.9)
So the dance emerges from movement within constraint, bodies within beats and bars,
interactions between and within and through bodies. Through such consorted and
concerted action, poiesis occurs.
At first what is constructed is the figure, only later does it become a side of the floor,
later still a circuit of the room. Once this is accomplished, the dance becomes endless,
repetition only constrained by the length of the music.
But then the balance between ‘repetition’ and ‘difference’ changes as more ‘figures’ are
added, each an assemblage of movements that lead back to the beginning. The
mechanistic becomes the organic with the introduction of ‘flow’, the continual
movement of bodily sway, the cyclical three beat becomes the fluidity of the turn and
the mastery of the floor.
Eventually the dance is set free. Waltzing is no longer the following of the teacher, nor
the mirroring of the partner. It is more than the combined creation of the couple, that
extends and blends with the music. It becomes an affective event, capable of evoking
emotions in onlookers. Beyond its own movement, it moves others.
The waltz is an outcome of the dancing, the interaction, the mechanics of feet and bodies.
Of course, interaction is important, it needs to be ‘right’, but it isn’t everything. Even
though it’s all interaction, interaction isn’t all. Even though the dance interaction is
mimetic it is also poietic and kinetic.
Dance and interaction design
Dance as theoretical device is emerging from new concerns about mobility and
movement in space (Thrift, 2007). New conceptual landscapes are opening up that
incorporate issues of gendered and performative movement in relation to technology
use and computer games (Kirkpatrick, 2010). This paper lightly engages with such
theoretical instincts by emphasising the empirical and the interactional. While inclusive
and accepting of useful theoretical resources, its heart lies in data and embodied
performance.
A corollary of rediscovering dance’s social interaction is a recognition of interaction
design’s everyday character. Interaction becomes interagency of people and machines in
an ongoing and emergent set of entanglements.
In sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) there is the notion of
‘choreography’. Cussins (1996) details the multiple elements to the generation of the
activity in an infertility clinic: people, machines, practices all interweave and combine.
Analytically, ‘choreographing’ speaks to the ambiguous and amorphous ‘consequences’
of these combination rather than a preplanned and regimented set of actions. Yet, at the
same time, the term choreography speaks to the apparent coordination of events. The
use of the ‘apparent’ here underlining the view ‘from the outside’. So from the outside,
these arrangements seem organised, however in reality they are the by product of an
ongoing set of ‘entanglements’ (refs). A focus on dance as interaction is a focus on these
entanglements, that are never-the-less elegant and emergently ‘a dance’.
Cussin’s position questions the ‘humanist argument that selves need to be protected
from technological objectification to ensure agency and authenticity’ (p. 576). Instead
she attends to the ‘dependence selves on technology’ (ibid) by understanding the
ontological connection between technology and selves as a matter of choreography.
Interaction becomes referential and entwined inter-agency.
Human computer interaction, and by extension interaction design processes. should not
be seen in terms of a dance performance but as a social dance of interaction. McCarthy
and Wright situate our ongoing interactions with technology in the ‘rhythmic dance of
aesthetic experience’. The issue of ‘rhythmicity’ (Maier, 1992) is key to the design of
dancing robots (Michalowski et al., 2007), the social relationships between robots and
humans (Diocaretz & van den Herik, 2009) as well as the temporality of urban
information systems (Reed & Webster, 2010). The social construction of technology is a
matter of the ‘dance of agencies’ (Pickering, 2008) and hence to fully understanding
interaction with computers we need to see it as part of and product of the social dance of
interactions.
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