"The pill", a laser dance, 2012, choreography by Maria Piedad

2.23.2013

Using internet connections in dance educational projects

        There has been different projects which have used internet to develop educational and performing projects in dance.

The TRIAD project (2001)
       This project used internet to establish communication between dance students (9-18 year-old) from the United States, Portugal and England. They worked with internet communications to cosntruct choreographic pieces and to receive feed back about their dance classes. In this case, the internet was not used to communicate simultaneously. In this way, the students had time to analyze and comment their own and other classmates´in other countries with out the pressure of a real-time connection which tends to improvisation.

                     The TRIAD Project: using Internet communications to challenge students’understandings of choreography
                       SITA POPAT,
                       School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, Bretton Hall Campus, U.K.
                       (e-mail: pcusp@leeds.ac.uk)

                       ABSTRACT

                       The TRIAD Project presents an innovative approach to the use of Information and Communication   
                       Technologies (ICTs) in the teaching of choreography. They formed an Internet dance community, sharing
                       their choreographic ideas via movies and text, and developing an original dance work. The asynchronous
                       method of communication encouraged a re ective attitude that supported the learning situation. Through
                       their efforts to explain their creative processes to peer groups via the dynamic Website, the young dancers
                       developed their personal understandings of choreography. The need to communicate clearly via text and
                       movies led to increases in the students’usage of dance-based critical vocabulary, and encouraged objective
                       appraisal of creative work. Discussion of the work by the other peer groups challenged the students to deal
                       with different dance styles and other choreographic approaches.
 
Back ground for the TRIAD project:
 
                        There are several examples both in performance and education of using real-time or
                        synchronous connections for choreographic work. Laura Knott carried out her experiments
                        with online live connections using Internet videoconferencing in 1998 with her World Simultaneous 
                        Dancce project.


                      As early as 1995, Amanda Steggell was working on a project called M@ggie’s Love Bytes where
                       participants from around the world could join a group of dancers in a theatre with an audience and give
                       input to affect the improvised dance.
 
                      In the education world, artists such as Susan Kozel and Wayne McGregor have used live videoconference
                  connections as part of workshops and courses. However, although these types of synchronous connections
                      reflect the immediacy of performance or the studio situation, they rely on reactive rather than reflective
                      methods of response. To be involved in this way in the making of choreography requires improvisation or
                      quick decision making, whereas work that is carried out asynchronously allows time for re ection and
                      consideration. In the classroom, the teacher will commonly set a task and then allow a period of time for
                      experimentation and discovery before asking for presentation of an outcome. During that period, the teacher
                      might move among the students, offering suggestions or advice on an individual basis and returning after a
                      short time to view progress, in a manner akin to the asynchronous method of working. Although
                      synchronous multimedia technology does not have the ‘high-tech’ excitement of live synchronous
                      connection, this research indicates that it may be the more effective vehicle for the teaching of
                      choreography.
                  Research in Dance Education, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2002
 
            This project set a preceding in the use of internet with educational purposes. Additionally, it took into account previous dance works using internet as a tool to work collaboratively between dance artists.Having an understanding about what have been done in the past in the dance field will be helpful to question those works with the objective to produce new interesting ways of using internet performances not only at a professional or university levels but also in regular schools.








No hay comentarios:

Publicar un comentario