INTRODUCTION

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Grounded on research in choreography, movement notation, and generative design, as well as my personal experiences as a dancer my project asks: How can a language of movements extracted from bodily responses to architecture become an instrument for design experimentation? In other words, how can a rule-based sequencing of dance moves interpret, geometrically distort, or generate form and space?

Choreography explores the relationship between the documentation of human movement and creative performance. Throughout the 20th century designers in architecture, planning, and landscape architecture have attempted to operationalize choreography as a way to record human occupation of space —from Alexander Klein’s graphical method to Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts; or to design form and space —from Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s RSVP method to Diller+Scofidio formal experiments. Notational systems and movement languages have been key in bridging choreography and architecture, both by translating between movement and form and by becoming a ground for interdisciplinary collaboration — examples include the relationship between the Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus pedagogy and Rudolf Laban’s Labanotation or William Forsythe’s more recent work such as One Flat Thing, Reproduced (2011).

Precisely because of their clear definitions, movement notation has also attracted the interest of other fields concerned with representing and systematizing human activities such as cognitive science and computer engineering. Most of that research is concerned with finding rules for sequencing elemental human movements in the context of various tasks, from climbing a stair to performing a surgery. These rule-based movement languages usually aspire to the replication and automation of human processes. In my project I focus instead on the generative, expressive and instructive potentials of movement languages for architecture.

My work links computational descriptions of design and embodied performance with choreographic languages to produce an open-ended instrument for design imagination. Using movement grammars, notational systems, and motion-capture; I dance the geometry of a mundane piece of architecture — an empty room and then record this improvisational dance using a notational system developed by the modern dance pioneer Noa Eshkol and Technion architecture professor Avraham Wachman. This is a system that has been taken up in computer science because of its ability to provide mathematically rigorous descriptions of movement based on the axis of the body and the positions of the limbs as these are projected on a sphere. Typically, movements are not drawn but instead written on a spreadsheet. However, in my project I have decided to emulate the graphic style of the EWMN system’s original exposition sketches from 1958 to create a more visually immediate notation and contemplate its geometric transcription, not dissimilar to several artworks that have been produced by Eshkol in the 1970s.

The project that I will present today consists of three key operations:

1. Using notation as a way to distort, to remap the geometry of a room into another geometry based on an improvisational dance that I performed in the room. [DISTORTIONS]
2. Extracting movement rules from that initial dance and using them to generate new geometries. In other words, operationalizing the movement language derived from the mundane square room to playfully generate new forms. [PERMUTATIONS]
3. Sequencing movement rules to emulate an occupation scenario of an architectural space and inferring that container space from the notation. [ACTIVITIES]

Questions that thread these three experiments together revolve around the translational potentials of notation, the embodiment of movement rules, and creative accidents that occur in the rift between choreography and dance performance.