Digital Dances Enhance Kids' Creativity - technology to create choreography and music - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, July, 2001 by Kate Mattingly Moran

Groundbreaking technology for creating choreography and music is growing out of a unique collaboration involving Ballet Frankfurt, a German applied-arts museum called mak.frankfurt, and Columbia University. But don't expect to see the results in opera houses or theaters any time soon. The project, which involves world-famous dance experts, including Ballet Frankfurt's choreographer William Forsythe and digital artist Paul Kaiser, focuses on using advanced technologies to nurture children's creativity. The JPMorgan Chase Kids Digital Movement and Sound Project (it's funded by JPMorgan Chase, a financial firm) presented its first showing in March at the Third World Summit on Media for Children in Thessaloniki, Greece.

There, young German performers aged 8 to 12 performed "duets" with tiny robots they had programmed to accelerate, turn, and flip. The choreography involved everyday human movements--walking, running, sliding--and games similar to Red Light, Green Light.

The project was launched last winter after Forsythe put James Bradburne, the director of mak.frankfurt, in touch with Kaiser. Once plans were laid out, Forsythe asked Ana Roman, a choreographer and, until recently, a Frankfurt Ballet dancer, to work directly with the kids.

Kaiser is best known in the dance world for BIPED, his stunning collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and Ghostcatching, which he made with Bill T. Jones. But the digital artist has been interested in education since the 1980s, when he worked with severely learning-disabled children at Washington, D.C.'s, Lab School.

"I tried to convince the children in D.C. that their vocabularies were much larger than they knew," says Kaiser. "I had each kid pantomime a verb that described a way of moving. I got an incredible response: They came up with seventy-six verbs, such as tiptoeing, cartwheeling, sauntering, and dashing." Similar exercises are used by Roman to jump-start choreography by kids taking part in the digital project. Forsythe added to the curriculum by suggesting various ways the children might improvise with their mechanical partners.

The goal of the project is "to use technology to allow children to have a direct relationship with movement and sound through their everyday experiences rather than in a stylized way," says composer Thanassis Rikakis, the Columbia University professor who developed the digital project's music component. "Hopefully, students will use that experience to create their own choreography and composition. But that is the second stage. The first stage is to enhance their relationship to movement and sound worlds."

To make a dance, children first take stock of their everyday motions. Then they break these movements down and codify them using a computer language called LOGO. "In LOGO," explains Rikakis, "each motion becomes an object: A straight line, for example, is six steps forward. Another object can be a 90-degree turn. It's very much how kids think." Children codify their moves and use that information to program robots.

The sound component works in a similar way. Children listen to and record sounds in their environments. Next they use a computer to break a selected sound down into its elements. Then they can use the elements as building blocks for their own musical compositions.

The technology required to make electronic music and dancing robots might seem far too expensive and advanced for the average classroom. But Rikakis insists that the digital instruments can be made by anyone. "Any high school student can go to Radio Shack and buy the parts and build the hardware for sensing and tracking movement."

In fact, the ultimate goal is to give any interested school or individual everything needed to create digital music and dance. "Our final product is going to be curriculum plus software plus hardware, all on a CD-ROM," says Rikakis. The organizers hope to have the disc ready by February 2002, and JPMorgan Chase plans to disseminate it free.