In conceiving and creating a dance that would utilize both the DIEM dance suit and accelerometers, the experience of working with the apparatus actually became the aesthetic and conceptual premise of the piece. Working with the technology gave the dancers a sense of freedom in a new realm, but also a feeling of restriction in their familiar modes of choreography and performance. Rather than trying to disguise or even overcome a feeling of being bound up by the technology, the dancers decided to work from within those feelings, and actually used the wires to become tethered to each other, tangled with one another.

The choreography was developed through improvisation, taking into account the form and qualities of movement that best displayed the potential of the movement/sound devices. It was not possible for the dancers to rehearse frequently with the equipment, so once they had an understanding of the composers' concept and the ways in which they controlled different aspects of the the sound signal, they worked with makeshift wires in place of the actual devices, and focused on recreating movements that they knew had certain effects, imagining as they choreographed the kind of sonic structure they would be creating. Once they returned to the sound studio and experimented with what they had made, they found that some of the effects they had anticipated occured, while others did not, and worked on adjusting the movement accordingly.

Under ideal circumstances, the dancers would have been able to choreograph and rehearse always with the movement sensors, to achieve a more detailed understanding of their nuances and capacities, and to experiment even further with combining their visions with those of the composer. Through the time that they did get to work with the equipment, the dancers gained a new sensitivity toward aspects of their movement previously taken for granted- brought to their awareness by the immediate aural feedback created by their gestures- and hopefully created a dance which is not only intriguing to the eyes and ears, but which also communicates to the audience the actual experience, the discoveries and the struggles, which made up the creative process of the work itself.

ep222@columbia.edu