Introduction.

Dance research and transmedia practices1

Cristina Righi and

Nicola Dusi2

Contemporary dance is a field full of interpretative possibilities for a

Semiotics interested in dynamic and performance open texts connected to theatre practice and/or multimedia. If dance manifests itself
as a choreographic discourse/text formed through a creative process
then, in order to investigate expression and contents in their narrative
or plastic nature, it will be appropriate to take into consideration
a series of issues related to the dimension of the senses, but also the
figurative and the interpretative dimensions, from the point of view of
dance main semiotic actors (dancer, choreographer, audience). Dance
as a process, dance as discourse, text analysis, notation, technology,
translation, arts, body, are therefore only some of the key words used
in this monographic issue, together with the notions of performance intended both as discourse and process - in the multiple semantic possibilities of a word in which spectacular conceptions and more semiotic ones, although overlapping, are all predominantly considered in
virtue of live execution. Nowadays, most of live contemporary dance
might be not so different from high technological dance performances,
either in their video or digital versions. This requires a renewed investigation of notions such as enunciation and utterance, as referring to
entities of bodies in motion whose texture can be thick and heavy or,
on the contrary, light, virtual and technological. In addition, among
the many visions of the dancing body offered by dance, there is that
of a body wrapping identities and bearing multiple subjectivities, and
there is also that of a body which is, in essence, the somatic substance
of motion, characterized by variable figurative plasticity, often altered
when encountering technological manipulations.
Approaching such an issue, the debate is open to contributions
from different study fields willing to confront themselves with these
themes, proposed because of their great interest for contemporary
semiotics and also for contemporary dance practice. Anthropological
research, media studies and dance studies in a broad sense, are all

This monographic issue is the result

of the international congress Il senso
della danza. Dance research e pratiche transmediali organised September
14th, 2008, in Urbino (Italy) by the
Centro Internazionale di Semiotica
e Linguistica of Urbino University.
Curators of the congress were Nicola
Dusi, Cristina Righi and Kathleen
Delaney. All the essays gathered here
have been presented during the works of
the congress except for those by Elodie
Verlinden, Philippe Guisgand et Katia
Lgeret which were included afterwards
because of the high pertinence of their
subject-matters to the themes of the
symposium.

E-mail addresses: c.righi5@virgilio.it;

nicola.dusi@tiscali.it ;

Cristina Righi and Nicola Dusi

welcome to help in deepening the exploration of choreographic texts

in their poly-sensory and syncretic nature, enlightening their semiotic
and inter-semiotic relations in order to discover which one is, for each
of them, the sense of dance. The aim is to supply a dialectic arena
in which some of these matters can be dealt with by researchers,
scholars, practitioners, and artists offering each their own, specific
point of view and bringing in their reflections and their experience in
order to question this comparatively new and multifaceted area, which
promises to be particularly suitable for generating innovative theoretical and practical approaches. The purpose is, indeed, to provide an
open perspective, an expanded and articulated vision capable to foster
contemporary research about such complex objects of analysis.
The outcomes of all this effort and commitment spent on the part
of those who have accepted to share their knowledge, skills, and practice have become part of this project and are now made available here,
hopefully as significant up-to-date material. This monographic issue
opens with some more theoretical essays by Dusi, Righi, Rubidge,
Pontremoli, Di Bernardi, Guisgand and Lgeret, whereas some casestudies are discussed in their essays by Ferrara, Nugent, Bizzarri,
Fabius, Verlinden, Delaney, and Albanese.
The essay by Nicola Dusi, Body, Space-Time, Movement: translating Dance in Film and Video, considers different textual examples of
early cinema, musical and video dance in order to think about theoretical problems found in those translation areas which extend among
the fictional body, the virtual (digital) body and the dancing body. It
also considers what happens when the body meets traditional media
and new media. From Loe Fuller's Serpentine dance to the video of
a performance by the United Visual Artists (UVA) Dusi analyzes
how repetitions, variations and figurative plasticity work in a close
dialogue between live enactment and textual digital representations
of movement. Motion capture or recent interactive 3D digital camera
and other multimedia devices manage to translate the dancer's body
in new substance systems, thanks to some common dimensions of
rhythm and plastic contrasts (i.e. light, shapes, space and movement)
that Deleuze would call "figural". The point is to look into representations of a dancer's body in cinema and video as a way to discover, and
make it explicit, that "field of tensions and forces" (Deleuze) which lies
underneath every human figure.
Cristina Righi's essay, Choreographic Sense and Transmedia

Dance research and transmedia practices

Practices, discusses dance from a semiotic point of view, offering

a choreosemiotic perspective when it comes to analyse technologically modified choreography. Advanced technologies, indeed, are
affecting dance and the choreographic process straight at their core,
opening them to entirely new perspective and procedures. Thanks
to sophisticated technology, choreographers, practitioners and dance
theoreticians are given the chance to question their own assumptions
and practice thus rethinking dance and its fundamental elements in
the light of fresh ways of conceiving dance performance. On the other
hand, the challenge of transmedia practices for (dance) semiotics is to
find ways of properly analyzing and describing how this very complex
translation process works and what the consequences are for the sense
of dance.
Sarah Rubidge's essay, Understanding in Our Bodies: Nonrepresentational Imagery and Dance, focuses on how dance meanings are
derived not merely from dance texts but also from sensory responses
to movement, both individual and collective. Grounded in the position
of many contemporary neuroscientists -Semir Zeki, Antonio Damasio,
Giacomo Rizzolatti and others- that understanding, and by extension
that consciousness, takes many forms and the knowledge derived from
our sensory systems might even colour our cognitive understanding.
In this context, Rubidge examines the role that physiological processes
might play in our understanding of certain forms of art work which are
derived from a dance sensibility but developed by digital media. She
refers, in particular, to those works whose intentionality includes the
heightening of physiological responses, so she addresses interactive
installations that use physiological responses as an active interface
with the viewer/ participant.
Alessandro Pontremolis essay, Dance, Body and Sense, questions
the very essence of sense by investigating what sense is, how it is offered to us, and under what conditions it is possible for it to be given in
dance. Although basically phenomenological, his approach also takes
into consideration authors such as Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion and
Virgilio Melchiorre, in the attempt to give an answer to the fundamental questions he is interested in. Exploring the body as a privileged
analogon a mediating substance- Pontremoli highlights how, even
before dancing or being immersed in society, the body allows immediate communication since it precedes language as well as any other
formalization.

Cristina Righi and Nicola Dusi

The essay by Vito Di Bernardi, Body writing and Corporeity in

Twentieth-Century Dance, focuses on dance as far as the senses are
concerned but also on the sense that dance produces for the dancers
who practice it. This viewpoint, centering on the dancers sensitivity,
allows Di Bernardi to discuss the idea that it is from the dance dimension of the senses that the revolutionary movement of the Twentiethcentury dance that of free-dance, modern dance and Ausdruckstanz
took its start. Exploring the conception of the body in choreographers such as Nijinsky, Graham, Cunningham, and Forsythe, Di
Bernardi observes how the sense of modern dance came from a new
attitude, a new sensitivity to the body and its potential that dancers
began to try out. He also underlines how the origin of modern dance,
arising from the creators individual sensibilities to the body, poses
the methodological (and the semiotic) problem of understanding if a
dancing body can still be considered as a meaningful morphological
unit, organized according to universal criteria which may be different
from those of classical ballet but are, nonetheless, homogeneous and
codified.
The essay by Elodie Verlinden, BIPED/Merce Cunningham,
focuses on the relations between what is dance and what is not, what
is reality and what is virtuality, what is original and what is a copy.
Biped consists of a real dancer dancing choreographies created by
computer by means of the software called Life Forms, and of a virtual
silhouette performing movements made by the dancer and caught by
the Motion Capture system. After having been a great innovator in the
fields of dramatisation, of symbolisation, of the psychological aspects
in relation to music, of linearity and of the central focus, Cunningham
has also offered a way to transform the debate about live and non-live
performance.
The essay by Andrea Ferrara, Body as a Biotic Instrument, stresses
the importance and the effect of a body considered as an instrument
and defined as biotic. The reciprocal relationship between the body
and the environment is set as a process through which the mind/body
system reacts back modifying the surrounding conditions. The effect
of this interaction is the production of biotic material, either in the
form of cerebral or kinetic signal. This kind of exploration, technologically mediated, allows to investigate the fluid borders between selfperception and environmental influences which Ferrara discusses by

Dance research and transmedia practices

means of two specific examples. He examines how, in practice, such

concepts are increasingly becoming part of a new stream of contemporary, multi-media, highly interactive tendency of art in the digital
age, all using the body as a biotic instrument.
The essay by Philippe Guisgand, Danse et transmdialit : sept
clats, starts by reminding us that transmediality is a quality which
has always belonged to dance since dance has always met other arts as
nowadays it meets technology. This new relationship between dance
and the media is illustrated through some examples from the contemporary dance scene: Jrme Bel and his peculiar treatment of movement; Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her poetics of movement as
perpetual present; Edouard Lock and his risky work on the exploration
of horizontal space in which movement speed, endless dynamism and
bodily deflagration are dominant; Mylne Benoit, interested in the
world of video games and avatars motion; William Forsythe and his
CDrom Improvisation technologies as an original new way to work
on his method. But none of these approaches seems to question the
audience-dancer relationship since new technologies do not alter the
esthetic connection of perception as bound to body sensible qualities.
However, they redefine its modalities and the extent of the field,
always keeping empathy at the core of the interactive process.
In her essay, The Dancing Texts of William Forsythe, Ann Nugent
is interested in exploring textual meaning as actualized in dance
performance, so she offers an analysis of three choreographies by
William Forsythe focusing on how his ballets generate codes, rules
and languages of their own, triggering emotions and memories in the
viewers. Aspects of signification are explored in Decreation (2003),
Kammer/Kammer (2000) and From a classical position (1997), whose
analysis considers the way in which signs that always shift between
the explicit and the implicit, manage to communicate. In Nugents
analysis, the Forsythescape appears to be made of multiple signifying
systems challenging the whole communication process and defeating
the common notion of meaning, which usually wants it to stop together
with the end of the dance.
The essay by Maria Cecilia Bizzarri, Cendrillon: le conte de fes
entre littrature et danse, discusses, from a semiotic point of view,
how the textual analysis of classical and contemporary dance pieces
discloses more complex translation processes which are never neutral.

Cristina Righi and Nicola Dusi

Bizzarri focuses on some crucial questions: how can dance carry sense
and, in so doing, tell a story? Can we speak about a translation from
literature to dance? Analyzing what the fairy-tale as a literary genre
and dance as an art language have in common, Bizzarri comes to the
conclusion that they both bring something deep, intimate and somehow universal to the text surface. What varies is the degree of faithfulness when the original fairy-tale is translated into contemporary
dance, which often updates, modifies and finally twists its structure.
In dance history, in fact, we can find fairy-tales expressly invented for
the stage, like Giselle or fairy-tales translated from literature, like
Cinderella, here examined in details by Bizzarri.
Jeroen Fabiuss essay, Con Forts Fleuve. Politics of Perception in
the Work of Boris Charmatz, brings the discourse back to a discussion
on the effects of the artistic manipulation of the senses. Exploring
Charmatzs choreographic work with specific reference to Hans-Thies
Lehmann's theory of the politics of perception in Fabius purpose is to
investigate how the French choreographer engages with a perception
mainly by obstructing the visual and privileging other senses -sound
and kinaesthesia- in a materialistic perspective of the body in which
the senses play a crucial role. For Fabius, the broader issue is to explore the political in relation to contemporary theatre considering that,
according to Lehmann, to exploit its political potential, theatre needs
to engage with its own ways of presentation so to set the conditions for
true communication.
The essay by Katia Lgeret, Mtaphore de Carolyn Carlson : une
potique de la transmdialit, approaches the issue of metaphor and
transmediality by focusing on Metafor, a dance piece by Carlson.
This dance work is mainly about exploring the dialogue among three
elements: the Arabian calligraphy projected onto a huge screen in the
background; western contemporary dance, inspired to the whirling
Dervishes sufi rituals; the film shooted during the preparation of the
performance. Lgeret examines Genette's, Ricoeur's and Fryes theories on metaphor in order to reach, thanks to Deleuze, a poetic reading
of intermedia forms of sense contamination. According to Lgeret,
the poetic transmediality of Metafor plays with imbalance, dissonance
and resonance among the three factors of image-movement, poetry,
and dance, constructing hybrid figures of bodies-poems between
fragments of poetry and body displacement.

Dance research and transmedia practices

Kathleen Delaney's essay, Metamorphoses of Dance: Live dance,

Videodance and Transmedia practices, discusses Baudrillard's ideas
that the dancers world is the world of metamorphosis and the audiences world is that of metaphor. The two worlds are kept independent
but they resonate in one another, suggesting the equivalence between
sense and the senses. Talking about the relation between dance and
the media, Delaney thinks that live dance suggests the idea of a
dramaturgy of perception while video-dance on the contrary, moves
within those areas that are excluded from a continuity of time, space
and movement, which is the realm of imagery. Dancers make choices
about where to go in the performance space and may create surprise
in the audience. They pass through forms and, living within them, they
are awoken to the world of metamorphosis. On the contrary, in video
dance and other transmedia practices dance opacity and the dancers
absence become explicit.
In her essay, Narrative Fragments in the Choreography of Giorgio
Rossi, Pamela Albanese considers the implications of some concepts
which are fundamental both for semiotics and dance, namely presentation vs representation of the body, narrative vs pure dance, and she
concludes that choreographies often enact a combination of the four.
Then, she presents her text analysis of Cielo, a dance work by the
Italian choreographer Giorgio Rossi, as an example of a syncretic text
made of dance, songs and music, in which a narrative that proceeds by
fragments produces micro-narrations. In this perspective, the songs
and their words are an essential element of the structure since they
act as a metalanguage to provide the key for interpretation without
depriving dance of its own narrative force.