Revealing the Wizard of Oz: Interrelationships between performer-dancer, performer-operator and digital sprite

This paper presents the findings of Projecting Performance, a year-long research project at the University of Leeds, UK, investigating interrelationships between performance and technology, dancer and operator. Performance academics are collaborating with digital technologists to develop new approaches to the role of the technical operator in performance. The project focuses on the choreographic and scenographic relationships between performer-dancer, projected digital non-humanoid ‘sprite’, and the newly-defined ‘performer-operator’. It questions the traditionally separated roles of performer and technologist, as the operator takes on an embodied role in performance. The project uses the ‘performance laboratory’ methodology established at the University of Leeds for collaborative practice-based research in performance.

This paper takes issue with the requirement for the dancer to act simultaneously as operator in interactive stage environments, as we see fundamental tensions between embodied performance and technical operation by spatial or physical triggers. Where the role of operator is separate from that of dancer, the operator’s engagement with the performance is usually of the ‘button-pushing’ variety; disembodied from the kinaesthetic experience of dancing in a Cartesian manner akin to the little man behind the magical façade of the Wizard of Oz. Instead, we choose to acknowledge the role of the operator as performer, and to explore potentials for that individual’s phenomenological and, critically, embodied engagement in the performance.

Our research translates the dialogue between performers in performance telematics directly into the interactive stage environment. The stage-performer interacts with the off-stage operator, who simultaneously sees, controls and ‘performs’ the projected image within the stage ‘picture’. Intuitive modes of input, such as freehand sketching via graphics tablets, allow the qualities of the operator’s spontaneous movement to become directly embedded in the digital sprite, concentrating those qualities through abstract forms and morphing the operator’s experience into a directly performative engagement with the theatrical space. Operators working in this way have described their activities as ‘dancing’ with the on-stage performer. Additionally, the sprite has its own particular qualities associated with colour, shape and behaviour that make it a third ‘partner’ in the performance. This paper will discuss the interrelationships between performer-dancer, projected sprite, and performer-operator, and their choreographic and scenographic consequences.

An important element of this research is the development of the ‘performance laboratory’ as a methodology for collaborative practice-based research. This methodology asks open-ended research questions within a playful environment that dissolves disciplinary boundaries and encourages ‘off-the-wall’ experimentation. In this project, flexible, tolerant software is used to facilitate fast alterations to the parameters of the sprites in response to the developing choreographic and design concepts. Collaborative research with robotics engineers and programmers in this manner has exposed the potential for knowledge transference between disciplines, and for ideas to be incubated and grow beyond the expectations of either discipline through iterative cycles of knowledge exchange. This paper explains how the methodology has led to new theorisations and practices of choreographic space, and innovative understandings of computer programming informed by kinaesthetic experience.

Projecting Performance is funded by a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.