This article aims to reveal how corporeality emerges from the meeting of the body with technologies, specifically in the context of the creative process for the interactive dance and sound piece Emovere (2015). Emovere’s creation process focused on configuring artistic material by exploring the biology of emotion, through experimenting with induction of emotional states based on corporeal patterns, using the Alba Emoting method, developed by the chilean psychologist Susana Bloch. At the same time the project involved experimentation with physiological sensors to modulate a sound environment by the dancers, creating an iterative process between embodied listening, sound composition and dance movement. A series of perceptive, sensory and affective practices had to be carried out in order to integrate the materials suggested by the experience with the emotional induction and the interactive and sound environment, arousing the emergence of new patterns of movement rooted on this new corporeal configuration.
Introduction
The Emovere Project1 began in 2014 in the University of Chile’s Faculty of Arts under the direction of the academics Francisca Morand and Javier Jaimovich, as an interdisciplinary collaboration for researching and developing artistic creation by looking at new technologies and interactivity. After more than five years, the collaborative has brought together students, artists, professionals and academics from different disciplines, such as dance, sound art, visual arts, engineering and theory, among others, to work with and discuss their areas of interest in multiple formats: creative works, workshops, residencies, seminars, conference presentations, organization of colloquiums and publications. This project has a major ingredient of technology, but always in relation to the body, a body approached from its biology, including its physiology, emotions, voice and biosignals as essential materials of the interactive process.
The project’s first interactive interdisciplinary piece was premiered under the name Emovere2 in October 2015. Emovere piece, has “emotion” at its center, in order to generate a work which, by using corporeal processes, built a dramatic poetic based on the biology of emotion, by intermingling the different materials and corporeal, subjective, dance, sound, lighting and technological procedures within an interdisciplinary artistic process. The work premiered in the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center had a season of 18 performances.
The project’s creative process involved experimentation with these technological devices as well as methodologies for inducing emotion. This article aims to reveal the corporeality3 that emerged from this meeting of the body with technologies. This meant that a series of perceptive, sensory and affective practices had to be carried out in order to integrate the materials suggested by the experience with the emotional induction and the interactive and sound environment. The design of the interactive platform, based on a system of physiological sensors, sound objects and the performers’ bodies, required a complex experimentation process to integrate each one in a configuration where all the elements had their own agency and expressivity. For the performers, the “destabilization” (Choinière, 2013, p.101) generated by the encounter with these new technologies demanded somatic processes in order to move with these stimuli and to understand how to access new patterns of emerging movement. Emovere required a performer who was sensitive and imaginative, as well as decisive and bold when addressing the experience with these new materials.
As part of the group of performers, consisting of four dancers, and as the director of the choreography for Emovere’s creative process, I was always in a state of surprise, open to what emerged and making decisions that always tried to integrate the different members of the project’s team, their knowledge and potentials. I decided to guide as well as perform, so I experienced the processes first and third person while developing this new knowledge. From my discipline perspective, I was excited by how the dancers’ corporeality was transformed by the encounter with the multiple and powerful experiences involved in Emovere’s creative process. The rawness and vitality of the pure emotions, the perception of corporeal internal processes facilitated by the system of physiological sensors, the chance to regulate the different surrounding sounds and the embodiment of these sound qualities, and the constant inter-subjective dialog of the creative process, generated a complex, unstable and physically intense environment that transformed us on artistic and human levels.
Corporeality in Emotion: “emotions are not expressed, they live”. (Bloch 2002, p. 256)
For Emovere we decided to approach emotion using a method of emotional induction that made us test and live this phenomenon first hand: the Alba Emoting4 system of induction developed by the Chilean psychologist and physiotherapist Susana Bloch. With this method basic emotions may be experienced and formed at will, by the voluntary activation (bottom-up) of certain respiratory rhythms, muscle tone, posture and facial and body movements, all related to basic emotions: fear, anger, sadness, eroticism, affection and happiness. “If a person correctly reproduces the specific breathing-posture-facial patterns of a basic emotion, the person enters into that emotion, regardless of the circumstantial, relational or historical context. Therefore, Alba Emoting is a universal accultural system that in practice functions based on the internal coherence of very precise physiological patterns.” (Bloch 2002,163)
William James was the first to develop a theory of somatic feedback, which has been revived and expanded by Antonio Damasio and Jesse Prinz (Ledoux, 1998). The somatic feedback theories suggest that the relation between the physiological signals generated in emotional states (changes in heart beat and frequency, breathing rhythm, visceral movements, changes in muscle tension and facial movements, among others) are really what produce emotional or affective states; without body there is no emotion. These physiological changes can be measured and monitored by physiological sensors, like those used in Emovere to design the interactive platform.
Specifically for Damasio (Damasio, 2005) the emotions are part of a primitive automated system that allows us to react to the world, immediately and without thinking. Emotions are part of that complex machinery that makes us want to eat, drink, have sex; crucial acts in the process of regulating a living body. Emotions achieve their aims by generating actions or physiological responses, such as the behavioral changes that Bloch used as effectors or entrances to the basic emotions and mechanisms for producing and adjusting these emotions on several levels.
The experience with the Alba Emoting method led to self-inducing and adjusting basic emotions, as well as to moving in different directions and dimensions the effector body movements that lead to the emotion. The experience of the emotion from corporeal processes made memories and images emerge that nourished the experience, although it was the exploration of these effector movements that really led the experience.
The force of each pure emotion and the deep holistic process that produced the emotional experience provided a productive environment for creation. The experience of the emotion enabled us to be in a known world, due to the universality of the emotions explored, while the loss of rational control confused us together with the exposure of emotional levels that usually occur under intimate conditions. The power of the emotional movements was a rich material that mobilized each performer from the subjective experience with each basic and universal emotion.
The somatic learning processes in the first and third person led to experiencing and recognizing simultaneously the corporeality produced by each emotion. For example, the exploration with the emotion of eroticism involved practicing effectors such as sinusoidal breathing, undulating movement of the pelvis, inward looking or with semi-closed eyelids (vision slightly blurred), bowed head and exposed neck forward, mouth open but relaxed with inhaling and exhaling through the mouth5. This body configuration produced in all of us the arousal of touch, soft, undulating, tridimensional and volumetric movements, a preponderance in the movement of the body’s central zone, a dense and heavy atmosphere, but rhythmically regular with slight accelerations. The emerging corporeality of the emotion of eroticism was later analyzed in videos and among the performers, noting each one’s movement patterns, differences and similarities, which helped to give new meaning as a group to the intimate experience with the emotion. This process of analysis facilitated the deconstruction and reconstruction of an corporeality based on each emotion, together with the reconfigurations and creations of new contexts anchored in deeply experienced body sensations; a creation that from different perspectives allowed each performer to expand his/her movement resources, as well as to make an internal and affected connection with the biology of the emotion.
Emovere interactive system
“The internal electric flow of my muscles, an imperceptible river of energy, modifying the emerging sound; it goes through, breaks, distorts, repairs. With each emerging sound I make decisions, milliseconds to bend, stretch, compress, expand, twist, writhe6.” (Text of Fragile Intersections)
The technological and corporeal process is based on the measurement of the biosignals such as cardiac frequency (electrocardiogram) and muscle tension (electromyogram) of the performers in order to modulate the surrounding sound. The biosignals emanating from the emotional states and from the movement of the performers were captured by physiological sensors that measured the miniscule electrical changes produced by the nervous system, which were then sent wirelessly to a computer where they were processed and mapped with different “sound objects”. “Similar to the acousmatic definition proposed by Schaeffer (2017), sound objects are defined in the scope of this project as units of sound that share an intention of listening and a sound quality, contained in a patch of the Max/MSP environment. These patches are programmed based on a sound design that could be modulated and modified by control signals (i.e. physiological signals). Each object in Emovere was designed to be connected to a specific interaction mode, with each interaction mode able to connect to one or several sound objects simultaneously or sequentially during the performance. ” (Jaimovich & Morand, 2019, p. 9)
The new cognitive and sensory forms presented by the interactive system exposed each performer to a multisensory experience that led to the emergence of a specific corporeality in each one, an corporeality based on the agential dialog with the system. “Thus, one of the important challenges of the laboratory process was to design an interaction system that could link the technical and expressive aspects of the body, the emotion, the choreography, and the sound composition, providing space for each to manifest itself within the creation.” (Jaimovich & Morand 2019, p.8)7 This configuration, or as Leman calls it “micro-integration” (Leman 2008, p.140), made it possible to generate a field of complex relationships between the different agents of the interactive platform, so that each one could be expressed and would continue evolving during the different phases of the creative process. This micro-integration allowed the expressive aspects to be extracted from each agent and used in the configuration and affection of the others. For example, the performers’ voices, recorded during the emotional states, were used to form a large part of the sound material, which in turn affected them during the modulation in movement with these sound objects.
The interactive system was focused on connecting the dancers’ bodies so they would be the ones to produce the modulations of the work’s surrounding sounds. “The goal was not to transform the body into a sort of machine with full control, but rather to measure and amplify the variations that occurred while performing so that they could be expressed in the piece’s sonority, whether they were the product of choreographed actions, the performers’ intentions, or other changes experienced by their bodies.” (Jaimovich & Morand, 2019, p.8) Emovere’s interactive process did not seek to define and determine specific movements in order to connect the different parts of the work, but to “inaugurate techniques and approaches for encountering, understanding, and taking greater agency in, our continuous, relational performance.”( Stern, 2013 p. 66 )
The interactive system designed in Emovere was a system with “agency”, “an interactive coupling of distributed actions of human beings, machines and signs in a hybrid constellation.” (Hyun Kim and Seifert 2007, p. 232) The concept of “agency” in an interactive system, implies that human beings, things, technical devices, and symbols are to be regarded as equal parties participating in an (inter)action. So, in a system with agency human beings and machines interact in “a unity organizing and generating an « embodied meaning. »(Stern, 2013, p. 58)
The possibility of agency, the power and the means to influence the sound system was decisive in the appearance of the expressiveness of this entire hybrid system and particularly of the performers. The dancers’ movements and gestures fused functional and expressive movements, emerging from their own agency within this system. To generate this “constellation of agents”, working phases were structured to practice the functional aspects in order to reach what we would call an expressive phase, so that a complex and multidimensional corporeality was consolidated within a human and technological ecosystem that would be the expressive force and Emovere’s poetic.
Corporeality in interaction with biofeedback
“There is an answer to the question, I take and I allow myself to be taken, crossed by a sea of organic information. The event is so dramatic that control is a senseless utopia. Change, surprise, risk and failure seduce me. The strategy of confusion becomes a revelation. TO KNOW is not important or necessary. TO KNOW is not possible, TO KNOW is uncertain, exciting, destabilizing…” (Text Fragile Intersections)
The process of generating a language of movement from sound interaction demanded a corporeal approach from the performer where kinesthetic and auditory perceptive skills as well as cognitive-technological skills came into play. The micro sensitivity of the sensors and the low level of control that enables the capture of physiological signals such as muscular contraction and heart rate, generate a state of focused and acute internal attention in constant dialog with the sound, which is expressing these miniscule body changes.
The first period is mainly functional, involving various processes for understanding the technical possibilities arising from the use of the physiological sensors mostly used in musical interfaces, now with dancers. (Ortiz, 2012) From the determination of the most efficient location for the sensors on the body to the individual design of physiological signal mapping for each performer, the first period of experimentation will be defined by exhaustive training of the performers with the system, together with their constant adaptation carried out by the team in charge of the technology. The performers were exposed to a process that required focused kinesthetic attention in order to develop a conscious, precise interactivity that would generate expressive movement in attunement with the interactive system.
“The dialogue between the performer and the machine is established at a technical level, but it is through training and attunement that their configuration unfolds. By training through threshold of rhythm, in the form of sound, vibration and light, before, during and after a performance, I become attuned with the system. I learned to affect its operations and to be affected by its reactions. Without my physiological body this kind of human-machine configuration would not be possible, yet, it is my phenomenal and immaterial body which becomes attuned with the system, incorporates it and performs through it.”(Donnarumma 2016, p. 218)
The finely tuned receptivity of the sensors and the variability faced with any stimulus of the physiological signals, made this interactive platform a highly sensitive system. The expression of the signals in sound showed an internal body space full of flows and variations that provided a dialog with the system and the body itself with precise attention to multiple emerging factors. The system’s variability suggested to us from the start that we were dealing with a dynamic, intangible and elusive ecosystem, an aesthetic written in the root of a biofeedback-based system.
The electromyograms (EMG) generated a stimulation for tactile and kinesthetic senses, by modulating the sound along with micro changes of the muscle tone. The external perception of the sensors and the internal perception of the muscle tone variations generated a constant feedback stimulated by the sound changes. The electrocardiogram (ECG) suggested a relationship with the internal body, where the heart rate was an intimate, elusive expression, hard to control in the emotional, breathing and movement processes overall. This sensitive and technological loop was the founding process for the emergence of Emovere’s corporeality. This multiple and complex perceptive state placed the body in an expanded present, in a synergy between feeling, thinking and moving. (Davison, 2016) Within this dialogical relationship, the instrument generated by the sensors and the sound “acts upon or guides the player’s body. It is perceived as an extra-personal force which pulls and pushes the player’s body inside and outside of its normal reach.”(Donnarumma 2016, p. 125) The first impact for the performers was to feel submerged in a sound atmosphere that was an expression of their own body’s internal processes. As expressed by the Emovere’s performer Poly Rodríguez:
“Both devices, electromyogram and electrocardiogram, generate porosities between the senses, creating a synthesis for entering a sensitive area, which was updated continuously by the body and sound interactions. To be aware simultaneously of internal-external sound and touch, generated a magical-amazing process of hyper-awareness and hyper-deception, testing the unknown, being able to hear with the muscles, move sound, touch with the heart, amplify my contractions, smell the silence…renew my memories.” (Rodríguez 2016, p. 81)
This necessary training process generated a body-machine relationship, where the movement within the system configured new senses and enabled the emergence of a way to move within this ecosystem. As Donnarumma notes, “this way of learning is neither fully conscious, nor completely stable. … a process where the instrument is not perceived as an external object or a prosthesis, in the traditional sense, but rather becomes gradually a part of the human body.”(Donnarumma 2016, p. 223)
It took some time to generate movements from a creative conscious that would transcend each one’s habits and the urge to control sound. There was a tendency to stabilize a functional body vocabulary to the sound system, setting movements to efficiently adjust the sound, taking an musical performer role. The location of the EMG with the emphasis on the localized variations of the muscle tone defined the start of the movement and its achievement. Donnarumma believes that what is important in the interactive process is “not to perform correctly, but to reach a certain level of entrainment, which enables movement to arise. As my intentions, both in terms of musical outcome and physical performance, are constrained, an observer finds it hard to define whether the instrument acts upon the body or vice versa.” (Donnarumma 2016, p. 224) Each performer’s personalized improvisations expanded the personal repertoire along with the other performers. The performers began to become aware of the body’s process of becoming more complex when they managed to relate different sections of the body as a global and separate whole, as well as a sensitive one in dialog with the modulated and emerging sound.
The sound, always faster than what could be controlled (although filters were applied to define thresholds that allowed greater control), expanded the body’s movement, but also in the case of the EMG, the minimal muscle contractions produced by the body when static but internally active also produced sound; the body’s expression in visible and invisible movement. The sound translation of the muscular signals did not always coincide with the quality of visible movement, which generated a disassociation between the corporeal action and the sound. This phenomena confused us and would make it difficult to read the system’s mechanism for a spectator not familiar with the use of physiological sensors. Donnarumma stresses that in biofeedback processes “what these experiments show is that by examining the physiology of human movement one can understand how a performer’s movement is generated rather than how it happens in space.”(Donnarumma 2016, p. 212)
The interactive process with the ECG, although voluntarily less controllable than the EMG, provided a deep and direct relation with the emotions8. The presence of the heart’s sound generated direct relationships with the physiology itself, while inviting images and emotional states that were expressed in sound variations. The relationship with these sound variations in turn generated a sensory perceptive loop that excited the performers when they noticed their own physiological changes and modified their emotional states. This powerful internal-external dialog enabled the appearance of a corporeality based on the emotional states and a sound formed by the multiple physiological fluctuations of their emotional flow.
A dialog with the system’s sensitivity and unpredictability required generating new relationships between sound and movement, which were not always the same qualities expressed by the body. This phenomenon offered a relativization of the sound-movement’s lineal process, where synchronization was one of the possibilities. Then a dialog between the performer and the sound became less predictable, maximizing the present moment and the ability to respond to what is emerging, a continuous reconfiguration of the possible relationships. This state of “flow”, as defined by Donnarumma, is the state of conscious and unconscious dialog that the performer enters into with the system, where the movement emerges in the core of the relations between “voluntary motor control, her physiological constraints, the body schemata, the presence or absence of sound, and the object, or lack thereof, against which muscular force is exerted. As these elements influence one another in a process of continuous negotiation movement is manifested in space.”(Donnarumma 2016: 190)
Sound Experience
“I immerse myself in an atmosphere of sound, I navigate an unstable flow of sounds disconnected by my body’s internal system. Disjointed I feel multiplied, displaced, incomplete. My body vibrates, pulses, reverberates, echoes, twists to the rhythm of the flow made sound. The difficulty to absorb the whole experience leaves me always on the edge, at the limit of my sound dance.” (Text Fragile Intersections)
The sound in Emovere had its own agency. The sound quality of the composed objects clearly shaped the performers’ movements. The approximation to the sound experience led to corporal questions and answers, at first entirely intuitive and relative to each subject. How were those sounds for each one? Why were the corporal responses so different and personal?
As Labelle notes, sound “emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it leaves a body and enters others; it binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, and the air oscillating.”(Stern, 2008, p. 221) The first coinciding descriptions among the four performers of Emovere about the sound movement experience referred to “a feeling of increased presence”, of “expanded body”, of dissolution between the edge of one’s own body and the surrounding environment. These sensations generated a base for the expressive embodied movement that grew complex with the qualitative aspects of the different sound objects composed for the work.
The sound moves the body in different mental and corporeal dimensions, which means that listening is a basic corporeal act. Recent studies and publications (Grimshaw and Garner 2015; Eric Clarke 2005; Leman 2008; Leman and Spieter 2014) suggest that the auditory experience is an embodied, relational, sensory and cognitive process that cannot be understood separately. Embodied listening also implies first, that the perception of the sound and the music is not only an effect of the perceptive processes, but also is an active activity of the person listening, which in turn influences the perception of that person (Marc & Jan Mae, Spieter 2014). This intentional activity where the listener, in search for meaning, brings other ideas and possibilities to the perceptive process, including memory, emotion, imagination, as well as the listener’s corporeal qualities and personal history. (Grimshaw and Garner 2015: 34)
Leman (Leman, 2008) proposes a model of musical cognition that puts embodiment in the center and where the physical, cultural and intersubjective aspects are conversing with the subject’s corporeal perception. Leman believes that body language in the listening processes is an important part of the music’s perception, comprehension and meaning process, because it is an expression of the subject’s internal processes while listening:
“I argue that corporeal intentionality can be conceived as an emerging effect of action/perception couplings, the underlying engine of which can be defined in terms of a sensorimotor system. The engine turns the physical energies of music into an imaginary world of objects having qualities, valences, goals, and intentions, and vice versa. Corporeal articulations can be seen as expressions of this process of turning physical energy into an action-relevant and, as a consequence, action-intended ontology.” (Leman, 2008: 85)
The research led by Leman proposes a model based on the verbal description of the musical experience together with the emerging body language. Leman stresses that this narrow relationship between perception and action is reflected in the corporeal articulations that express the anticipation of the sound stimulus. These corporeal articulations are emerging from the subjective experience with the music, that is lived in multimodal, structural, kinesthetic, synesthetic and affective terms, involving the entire subject. (Leman, 2008 p. 101) According to Leman, the essence of listening is multimodal, together with the entire perceptive experience about what surrounds us, implying a multisensory association that integrates the body movement. Multimodal experience, according to Steph Ceraso (Ceraso 2014) involves “not only the sensory, embodied experience of sound, but the material and environmental aspects that comprise and shape one’s embodied experience of sound.” (Ceraso 2014, p. 103) The structural aspects include prior knowledge of the music, although there are aspects that may be noticed by a general listener. The kinesthetic and synesthetic descriptions are based on the corporeal sensations and the affective ones are based on the description of emotions and/or feelings that emerge from these corporeal sensations. Although they seem to be classifiable, these different aspects of the music’s perception are processed in a holistic and complex way. (Leman, 2008)
In the Emovere creative process, the performers’ relation with the sound composition, involved processes of perception, association, translation, abstraction and representation of the sound environment that the performers themselves were modifying. In this perception-action loop movement relationships emerged in a dialog with the qualities of the sound objects. The sound qualities produced different effects in each performer, an individual generative process based on the embodied, sensitive listening and intuitive and immediate response to the sound stimulus. The performers were attuned to listening with exercises in which they narrated the images and metaphors suggested by the sound, making the perceptive process a conscious one together with the expressive movement that arose from the listening experience. This conscious process was supported by the use of the Laban Theory, which helped to technically describe the perception of sound qualities, connecting the performer directly to the movement.
In a large part of the creation each performer had a personal sound object that changed depending on the section of the work. This meant that each performer owned his/her sound, synthesizing with the sound articulations that emerged from the interaction. “Attuning aims at addressing higher-level features such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre, or patterns related to expressiveness, affects, and feelings. Attuning, more than synchronization, draws upon the idea that the world is perceived in terms of cues relevant to the subject’s action-oriented ontology.”(Leman, 2008, p.)
With each one’s specific sound, the movement articulation of the performers generated a complex sound atmosphere, which translated into corporeal relations not only with the sound object itself, but also with the sound ambient created by the mixing from the four performers sound objects. This background, which went from simplicity to saturation, produced a sound atmosphere that engendered the Emovere micro-relationships: it contained the movement, expressed the passing of emotions and pushed the performers to change themselves and to modify their sound universe. In this field of complex relations the body appeared affected by the sound, its own sound and that of others, together with the expanded presence of a body that was emotion, movement and agent of its own sound.
Corporeality and expressive interaction
“I sound, I move with the sound, I Move the sound, The sound moves me…I sound…My body sounds, visible and invisible, a jumble of forces, a transformer of space and time…an ambiguous body: open and closed, empty and connected, crossing over and crossed over…” (Text Fragile Intersections)
In this interactive loop sound is not only the effect, but also affects movement and emotion. And the movement and the emotion mutually affect the sound. After achieving the process of attunement with the system, a corporeality could be seen to emerge that was the synthesis of Emovere’s micro-relations. The manipulation of the system put all the senses into play, where the conscious and the unconscious regulated the body’s responses; an agent body affected by the sound, a unified and expressive configuration between the performer and the system.
“An amazing, astonishing present. I enter into an undefined state where I have to contract/expand myself in fragments, to activate the sensor. A universe of “conscious” ranges that nourish me introspectively thanks to the attentive tuning of the graduations (muscle tone changes), which the more they are practiced the more they appear; but at the same time a multiple warning “recommending” corporeal integration (not just the segment that activates the sensor), which awakens other possibilities, such as a zoom-in and a zoom-out.” (Rodríguez 2016, p.83)
This integration with the interactive system suggests a hybrid sounding body, where the movement makes sense within this system. Donnarumma describes this process in her work “Corpus Nil”, a performance work that developed sensors capable of capturing internal vibration of the muscles:
“The work thus shifts the focus of the performer-instrument relationship from the performer’s control over the instrument to a direct corporeal engagement between the two; a process of incorporation unfolding through the rhythm of sound, vibration and light.”(Donnarumma 2016, p. 192)
The concept of “expressivity” in an interactive system emerges when the subject makes a complex connection with the system, where the body, through unconscious processes, not very reflexively and very skillfully, takes advantage of the situations offered by the system. (Leman, 2016, p.5) In the case of Emovere, an important part of the expressivity in the interaction which occurred when each performer had the chance to tune in to the system, discovering the possibilities for articulation of and corporeal response to the sound objects. The constant flow of sound information forced the performer to make immediate, increasingly more conscious decisions, but always building on the present and attending to a very dynamic and unpredictable system. The expressive force of the movement was helped by the performer’s possibility to adjust the different sound layers, to produce unexpected changes in volume, to keep or break off the flow and to induce silence, creating internal articulations in the sound object.
This corporeality emerging in each performer transcends the control decision or the impulsive reaction; it was a sensitive dialog with the whole system, that meant instantly setting up on several levels at once, until fusing with the sound. The performer’s body appears as a flow of changes and relationships between her body and the sound that voluntarily and involuntarily adjustments, placing her/him in a conscious instability, in a repetitive process of perceiving, feeling, acting and expressing creatively. This emerging corporeality was the expression, representation and interpretation of the self-feeling, listen and imagine itself in conversation with the multiple stimuli and emotions; a process where inside and outside fuse in a single powerful experience:
“Then my perception/imagination is immersed along unexpected paths, I can create from the sound, adjusting the corporeal forces (from outside to inside), from which my body is feeling that it has to activate the sensors (from inside to outside), from both without the clarity of being in one, another, between or in both.” (Rodríguez, 2016, p. 82)
The movement of the sound was part of the movement of the body: we enter in a new coexistence were body and sound fused in a sounding body. Each of us, having our own way to interact and sense our body in the sound, generated new patterns of movements emerging from the explorations and structured improvisations, creating a field of probabilities and new possibilities for the piece’s movement language; a language rooted in the corporeality emerging from the in-between of emotion and technology, the expressive force of the Emovere poetic.
Notes
[1] Emovere, on line, <www.emovere.cl>, accessed on May 8 2019.
[2] Emovere is the latin root of emotion, which means to move out, agitate, remove. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjMTZ2sfGog.
[3] The concept is based on Ann Cooper Albright definition of corporeality “as an intertwining of sensation and perception where the body remains anchored as the central scope of awareness9”.
[4]This is a method of induction, formation and experience of the emotions based on posture and breathing patterns, that is, the physical (what has been called a process of bottom-up emotional activation). It is used in different areas, from training actors (currently required reading in some universities) to coaching in companies and psychotherapy. https://www.albaemoting.cl/, accessed May 15 2019.
[5] Proyecto Emovere, « Emovere – CÁPSULA EROTISMO», , on line, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA6oqrByV4Y&t=18s>, accessed 5 June 2019.
[6] “Fragile Intersections,” the new work of the Emovere Project, is a currently ongoing interdisciplinary interactive project involving several stages, where performance and installation are merged in a single work, reflecting on the contemporary body that emerges from the intersection and interaction of its biology with technology. https://www.emovere.cl/temp/home/intersecciones-fragiles/, accessed June 26 2019.
[7] ”Shaping the biology of emotion: Emovere, an interactive performance”, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, vol. 15, no1, janvier 2019, p. 35-52.
[8] Rehearsal session in Emovere with EMG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zikG73Wbu58, accessed 3 July 2019.
[9] Ann Cooper Albright, « Split Intimacies: Corporeality in Contemporary Theater and Dance » In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, New York, Oxford University Press, 2015. p.20.
Bibliographie
– Albright, Ann Cooper, « Split Intimacies: Corporeality in Contemporary Theater and Dance. », dans The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, New York, Oxford University Press, 2015. p. 19-34
– Altavilla, Alessandro, Baptiste Caramiaux et Atau Tanaka, «Towards Gestural Sonic Affordances», Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Dajeon, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 2013.
– Bloch, Susana, Alba Emoting: Bases científicas del Emocionar, Editorial Universidad de Santiago, Chili, 2002. 206 p.
– Bloch, Susana et Madeleine Lemeignan, «Precise respiratory-posturo-facial patterns are related to specific basic emotions», Bewegen y Hulpverlening, Holland, 1992.
– Choinière, Isabelle, «For a methodology of transformation at the crossroads of somatics and technology: Becoming another …» Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, vol. 5, 2013, p. 95–112.
– Clarke, E, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005. 237 p.
– Ceraso, Steph, «(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences», College English, vol. 77, no 2, Novembre 2014. p. 102-123.
– Damasio, Antonio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Pearson, 2005, 336 p.
– Davison, Andrea, «Ontological shifts: Multi-sensoriality and embodiment in a third wave of digital interfaces», Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, vol. 8, no 1, 2016, p. 21-42.
– Donnarumma, Marco, «Configuring Corporeality: Performing Bodies, Vibrations and New Musical Instruments», thèse de doctorat, département d’informatique, Goldsmiths University of London, 2016, 329 f.
– Grimshaw, Mark et Tom Garner, Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception, Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 p.
– Hyun Kim, Jin et Uwe Seifert, «Embodiment and Agency: Towards an Aesthetics of Interactive Performativity», Proceedings SMC’07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, juillet 2007, p. 230-237.
– Leman, Marc, Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008, 297 p.
– Leman, Marc, The Expressive Moment: How Interaction (with Music) Shapes Human Empowerment, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2016, 252 p.
– Leman, Marc et Jan Mae Spieter, «The Role of Embodiment in the Perception of Music», Empirical Musicology Review, vol. 9, no 3-4, 2014. p 236-246
– Ledoux, Joseph, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1998. 384 p.
– Jaimovich, Javier et Francesca Morand, «Shaping the biology of emotion: Emovere, an interactive performance», International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, vol. 15, no 1, janvier 2019, p. 35-52.
– Maes, Pieter-Jan, et al., «The Coupling of Action and Perception in Musical Meaning Formation», Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 32, no 1, septembre 2014, p. 67-84.
– Mendoza Garay, Juan Iggnacio et Marc Thompson, «Gestural Agency in Human-Machine Musical Interaction», dans Lesaffre, Micheline, Maes, Pieter-Jan et Leman, Marc, The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017, p. 412-419.
– Ortiz, Miguel, «A Brief History of Biosignal-Driven Art: From Biofeedback to Biophysical Performance», eContact! 14 (2), Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), 2012, en ligne, <http://econtact.ca/ 14_2/ortiz_biofeedback.html>, consulté le 6 juin 2019.
– Peters, Deniz, «Letting the Body Decide: Creativity, Gesture and Musical Embodiment in Space as a Virtual Instrument», CMPCP Performance Studies Network International Conference, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, juillet 2011.
– Rodríguez, Poly, «Emovere: amor romántico entre el tacto, la audición y los afectos», Revista A-DNZ, Universidad de Chile, Departamento de Danza, juillet 2016, p. 80-85, en ligne, <https://adnz.uchile.cl/index.php/ADNZ/issue/view/4543>, consulté le 18 juin 2019.
– Stern, Nataniel, Interactive Art and corporeality: The Implicit Body as Performance, Canterbury, Gylphi Limited Book, 2013, 261 p.
– Tanaka, Atau, Alessandro Altavilla et Neal Spowage, «Gestural Musical Affordances», Gestural Musical Affordances. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Sound and Music Computing, juillet 2012, en ligne, <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=…> consulté le 24 février 2019.