Dancing with digital technologies: how dance and technology collaborate
“As we draw towards a future that has virtual reality much more incorporated within it, how are we as humans within that virtual paradigm? And if we're mainly being seen as a virtual avatar or element, who are we as humans?”
These are questions posed by Dr Megan Beckwith, a transmedia artist and lecturer in Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts.
“As we draw towards a future that has virtual reality much more incorporated within it, how are we as humans within that virtual paradigm? And if we're mainly being seen as a virtual avatar or element, who are we as humans?”
These are questions posed by Dr Megan Beckwith about our increasingly virtual lives. Megan is a transmedia artist and lecturer in Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) whose work for two decades has existed at the intersection of dance and digital technologies.
Megan began as a student at the VCA’s School of Dance, graduating in 1999. At the same time she was studying dance, she started gaming.
“Not that anybody knew about the gaming at the time. But I had a computer at home and I would game when I wasn't working on essays or working on my studies.”
In 1999 gaming was a fringe sport, requiring a level of computer competency much higher than is required of gamers today. Now, over twenty years later but particularly since COVID, the digital dance niche that Megan has carved out for herself has moved from the fringes to the mainstream.
At the time we spoke, Megan had just returned from presenting at the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) conference in New Zealand where she spoke about how digital technologies can be used in dance performance and how they might help to create new modes of moving.
“Not so much to redefine what dance is, but to break habitual movement patterns and to find new modalities of performance,” she elaborated.
These questions are being asked increasingly at VCA Dance, especially since the pandemic saw us all experience a rupture in our ‘habitual movement patterns’ to inhabit increasingly virtual and digitally-mediated worlds.
Fostering our technological imaginations
The possibilities and ethical implications of the use of digital technology with art were discussed during the talk ‘Creative technologies and intertwined innovation’, as part of the VCA’s 2022 Director’s Dialogue series. The speakers questioned how imagination is intertwined with technology and how technology might push the boundaries of art and the body.
Head of Dance, Professor Carol Brown was one of the speakers.
“Here at the VCA we’re really bringing together the deep knowledge that we have from different histories and temporalities of what theatre as performance means, but dance as a practice has always had a bit of a preoccupation with the idea of the machine dance,” she said.
One example she spoke about was Demon Machine. In 1939 Gertrud Bodenweiser’s dancers toured Australia from Vienna with Demon Machine in which performers enact machine-like movements. The work explores, as Carol puts it, “how the kinetic movement… of an industrial machine translates into the sentient life of a body.”
Reviewers of Demon Machine at the timecommented that the work evoked, sometimes jarringly, sometimes beautifully, the power that machines have over people.
It is interesting to reflect on works continually made about the effects of machines on people, and how dancers continue to co-create with machines and technology.
“Digital technology is a tool,” said Megan.
Dancers can be critical of certain technologies while using them to co-create imaginative alternatives.
"Dance will remain dance and [the same goes for] performance and opera and music and drama, all those elements will remain central and vital. The digital is an add-on to your central performance mode,” said Megan.
There is a Motion Capture Studio embedded in the Dance Studio Theatre at the VCA called The TrakLab that Megan coordinates. Motion capture technology enables bodies to be hooked up to markers that are seen by cameras in a volume of capture. This technology enables artists to create avatars and animations in digital worlds. Megan is excited about the possibilities this technology opens up for dancers.
“This will give us a whole new range of performance ideas and dance and performance creation possibilities that we haven't had before,” she said.
“Thinking with” digital technologies
In 2017 Megan worked on a project with Dr Alison Bennett called Virtual Drag. This involved collaborating with drag kings and drag queens, who were turned into avatars in a VR world using 360 scanning technology.
“So we were really pushing those boundaries of what was possible conceptually for both performance and for gaming technologies,” she said.
Like many of Megan’s projects, Virtual Drag explores possibilities for emerging performance technologies, but also how these technologies can be used in ways that destabilise existing power imbalances in tech developments.
“We were queering the idea of virtual reality. And in doing so, it took both drag into a virtual world and took the virtual world into more of a queer… I'm going to say the word ‘paradigm’ again,” she said.
Another recent project of Megan’s, a golden tentacled avatar created using motion capture technology, is called Chthulucene. The artwork references a concept of the theorist Donna Haraway. Chthulucene is a term Haraway elicits to describe our geological epoch, an alternative to ‘Anthropocene’. The term refers to a time of interspecies and technological overlaps - a time when geological objects as well as digital, human and non-human animals ‘think with’ each other to co-create better futures.
“It's about being a conglomeration of bits and parts,” says Megan.
Megan’s work, at the intersection of dance and digital technologies fits in nicely with the concept. The Chthulucene asks how assemblages of things, for example dancers, nodes, motion capture technologies and screens might help us to live well and guide us through uncertain times.
“It gives us alternatives, doesn't it? And it gives us the possibility to find new ways to regenerate in whatever that form might be,” says Megan.
“The earth is going through change, and maybe in the future we might really need to be digitally mediated like we were in Zoom. Nobody would've predicted that we would be sitting on Zoom for hours and hours in 2019. But by the year 2020, we were.”
“So change happens rapidly and it's important that we try and grapple with those ideas when we can.”
Dance at its best, like every other artform, is a reflection of life and evolves in step with technological changes. Artists investigating the relationship between the virtual and the real are in an exciting position to mould those changes imaginatively.
In her fellowship over the next two years, Megan will be trying to push and “find the edges” of what emerging digital technologies, combined with performance, may have to offer us.
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