Visualizing Isadora Duncan’s movements qualities

Abstract

We present a new abstract representation of choreographic motion that conveys the movement quality of fluidity that is central to the style of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. We designed our model through a collaboration with an expert Duncanian dancer, using five flexible ribbons joining at the solar plexus and animated it from motion capture data using a tailored optimization-based algorithm. We display our model in a Hololens headset and provide features that allow to visualize and manipulate it in order to understand and learn Duncan's choreographic style. Through a series of workshops, we explored our system with professional dancers and were able to observe how it provides them with an immersive experience of a novel visualization of Duncan movement qualities in a way that was not possible with traditional human-like or skeleton-based representations.

Supporting Perception of Spatiality in Dance in Augmented Reality

“…In [32], we introduced a model which consists of 5 flexible ribbons joined together at the solar plexus. This model has been codesigned with an expert connoisseur of Isadora Duncan's repertoire and has been perceived by dancers to convey Duncan's quality despite -or because of-its abstract representation.…”

“…Figure 2 shows the Sutton notation of the Prélude dance. To represent the body as stick figures, we chose a ribbon model that we developped in our previous work [32]. This model was tailored to the style of Isadora Duncan.…”

“…This model was tailored to the style of Isadora Duncan. We assessed this model in a study with dancers where we showed that it represents the movement qualities of Isadora Duncan faithfully, more so through its simplicity and abstract representation of the body [32]. The model is made of 5 flexible ribbons joining at the solar plexus.…”

“…In a previous study on designing systems to support the transmission of Isadora Duncan's repertoire, we co-designed with a connoisseur a star-like ribbon made of five flexible ribbons joining at the solar plexus and animated it from motion capture data using tailored optimization-based algorithm to represent Duncan's qualities of fluidity and wave-like movement that initiates from the solar plexus [32]. Isadora Duncan is one of the pioneers of today's modern and contemporary dance.…”

“…We chose to represent the body as stick figures. We based the design of the stick figures on the star-like ribbon joining at the solar plexus that we developed previously in [32]. We added to the ribbon model a visualization of the trace of the solar plexus.…”