Interactive Visuals as Metaphors for Dance Movement Qualities

The notion of “movement qualities” is central in contemporary dance; it describes the manner in which a movement is executed. Movement qualities convey information revealing movement expressiveness; their use has strong potential for movement-based interaction with applications in arts, entertainment, education, or rehabilitation. The purpose of our research is to design and evaluate interactive reflexive visuals for movement qualities. The theoretical basis for this research is drawn from a collaboration with the members of the international dance company Emio Greco|PC to study their formalization of movement qualities. We designed a pedagogical interactive installation called Double Skin/Double Mind (DS/DM) for the analysis and visualization of movement qualities through physical model-based interactive renderings.

In this article, we first evaluate dancers’ perception of the visuals as metaphors for movement qualities. This evaluation shows that, depending on the physical model parameterization, the visuals are capable of generating dynamic behaviors that the dancers associate with DS/DM movement qualities. Moreover, we evaluate dance students’ and professionals’ experience of the interactive visuals in the context of a dance pedagogical workshop and a professional dance training. The results of these evaluations show that the dancers consider the interactive visuals to be a reflexive system that encourages them to perform, improves their experience, and contributes to a better understanding of movement qualities. Our findings support research on interactive systems for real-time analysis and visualization of movement qualities, which open new perspectives in movement-based interaction design.