Response to Berkeley Dance Project 2007

The piece The Reception, featured in the Berkeley Dance Project 2007 at UC Berkeley, is an examination of “cyber culture” and “corporeal presence” through a crossing of choreographed dance and what they described as tele-immersion technology. The thirty-minute Reception included actual dancers who interacted with people that were filmed and then either televised on a monitor, or projected onto a screen. The narrator, who also physically participated in the show, asked the audience to examine their own notions of presence, and whether the lack of physical presence can be replaced, and equally so, through cyber-incarnations. These questions echo the notions of Mark Hansen in his article Seeing with the Body.

In the first segment, a female dancer dances with a cybernetic partner projected on a large screen in front of her. A web camera captures the image of the dancing girl, and, remotely, sends the image to a program in another building on campus, which reinterprets the image, transports it back, and projects a pixilated dancer on the large screen. The result is a sort of digital shadow. As the process of capturing the image, transporting it, and transposing it takes a few seconds, there is a slight delay between the dancer and her digital shadow. The actual dancer reacts to this delay, and tends to repeat herself, in order to present the illusion of dancing with an actual partner, or perhaps just her reflection. From this, arises the dichotomy of whether the digitization is supposed to simply be a sort of reflection (ballerina practicing in a mirror), or the replacement of a human, creating a new dance partner that will never break synchronicity.

The second segment questioned the notion of presence, and the lack thereof, in connection with digital replacement. The narrator muses on a distant lover, and his desire to see her and be with her. He then interacts with a “talking-head” (the head and shoulders) version of his lover playing on a monitor from a pre-recorded video. They converse back and forth with one another, presenting a believable interaction. Two questions arise from this. Firstly, from a personal standpoint, if our ideas on “what is real” are merely reinterpretations of our perceptions of reality, then does a digital reincarnation of someone suffice for their absence if we perceive the digitization to be real? And secondly, from an audience standpoint, and through a similar reasoning, is there a difference between watching two real people interact, and a real person and a digitally portrayed person interact if we can ignore the presence of digitization?

The questions raised in The Reception are tackled by Mark Hansen in his article Seeing with the Body. Hansen claims that digital reinterpretation, such as that featured in the dance piece, creates a “plane severed from a human observer”. (58) He believes that this in no way mimics or suffices for human presence. The existence of digital medium blocks reality-based human perception, as we are cut off from the “real” emotions of physical contact.

Eddie Berman