Brighton digital festival: The measures taken

The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove, Friday, September 26

MAKING choreography interact with digital technology is nothing new.

But for the first production by his new dance company, artistic director Alexander Whitley was determined to provide a more balanced take on our relationship with the revolution transforming the way we communicate and see the world.

“Our attitude to technology is usually portrayed in one of two ways,” he says as The Measures Taken comes to The Old Market as part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

“It’s either our saviour, the answer to all our problems, or a nemesis which will destroy us.

“We all agreed we didn’t want to make a work which fell into those binary positions. We wanted to explore the subject matter in all its possibilities and not necessarily come down on either one of those sides.”

Working in collaboration with Marshmallow Laser Feast, who Whitley first worked with as part of the Rambert Dance Company in 2009, The Measures Taken combines movement with motion tracking technology.

The five dancers on stage interact with digitally projected complex geometric shapes, simple lines and more in a 45-minute piece which was scaled up from an initial 2013 research project.

“There had to be good reasons for me to choose to work with the technology,” says Whitley.

“Technology can be seen as a way of jazzing something up and adding another level of visual beauty, without necessarily contributing to the integrity of the work itself.

“More and more serious artists are making work from a technological standpoint from the beginning rather than being an artist working in a different discipline incorporating technology into their work.”

He admits the motion tracking technology opened up a whole range of ideas.

“Even five years ago the technology we are using would have been prohibitively expensive,” he says. “It’s something now you can pick up for £200 or less secondhand, so it is something a lot more people are exploring and working with.

“I wanted to develop the technology so it didn’t provide me with limitations as a choreographer. We were developing the dance piece around Marshmallow Laser Feast developing the motion tracking system so it was capable of tracking a large area of space the size of a dance stage.”

The real time interpretive technology means the dancers’ movements automatically trigger visuals setting up the relationship between the dancers and those visuals.

“The interactive technology can be interesting in the first person when they can see the visual correlation between one action and the movement of the visuals,” says Whitley.

“As a third person watching it isn’t quite as exciting – you get it quite quickly, the relationship becomes quite predictable. We had to develop it in more complex ways, questioning what the relationship can be and whether you can play with expectations. It was hard to condense down to 40 minutes!”

Whitley plans to do more with the technology – reducing the number of dancers on stage for his next work to two.

“I want to explore the relationship between dance and visuals in a more concentrated way,” he says. “The group provided more options, and added the complexity of tracking the detailed movements of not just one dancer.

“In The Measures Taken they were moving across, in front and around each other. Two bodies can become melded together, which provides quite a challenge for Marshmallow Laser Feast in ways of keeping track of who is where, and which body part is which.

“Working with two dancers will simplify it to some extent, but also investigate the relationship more deeply to a more detailed level.”