Event Date
Event Date
Location
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246
Rethinking Motion Data for Dance Historical Inquiry and Interpretation
This talk draws on a decade of projects led by Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench to build dialogues between dance historical research and emerging technologies, most recently a dance data commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art. We began by asking: what are the questions and problems that make the curation, analysis, and visualization of data meaningful for dance historical analysis? In the process, we discovered that we also needed to be asking the reverse: what might digital methods learn from dance, in particular with respect to bodies and data? How might dance-based knowledge practices help to develop new ways of approaching data as a humanistic concern? I introduce our practices of visceral data analysis and kinesthetic attunement through the manual curation of datasets from print archives, before turning how those practices translated (and did not) as we began to add computer vision and motion capture. Across these examples, I explore how research into historical embodiment can be extended through a data frame, without being limited to what data alone can reveal or represent, and conclude by proposing an expanded register of motion data that is both individual and collective, shared across generations through deep bodily time
Kate Elswit is Professor of Performance and Technology and Head of Digital Research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity (PTEQ), which was founded in 2024 with £5.6 million investment from Research England. Her research sits at the intersection of bodies and technology, from archival data curation and visualization, to performances with breath monitors, to exploratory research in motion capture, computer vision, and AI. For the past decade, she has been collaborating with Harmony Bench to bring dance and experimental digital practice into conversation, including through the AHRC-funded projects Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data (2022-25) and Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (2018-22), which won multiple field awards and was archived by the Library of Congress. These projects address the questions and problems that make data meaningful for dance, as well as how digital methods need to be modified to engage with the embodied knowledges that underlie dance history. As Moving Data, they were commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for a series of time-based dance data visualizations, which appeared in the acclaimed Edges of Ailey exhibition (2024-25). Elswit’s print publications include the award-winning books Watching Weimar Dance (2014) and Theatre & Dance (2018), as well as twenty peer-reviewed essays. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.