Case study: Sylvia Rijmer

Sylvia Rijmer is our third invited choreographer. The encounter with Sylvia and the BlackBox team was immediate and extremely spontaneous: the impulse coming from both sides, as if by serendipity, and with the same intensity. A strong will to collaborate was the trigger for this particularly experimental study, both artistic and laboratorial. Important to this particular project has been the curiosity to reveal Sylvia Rijmer’s analytical choreographic process and the recognition of the value of sharing, which has multiplied the positive effects of a truly interdisciplinary and transmodal research within a collaborative study where brain, body and movement were the focus.

This case study has resulted from the convergence between Sylvia’s drive to formalise her compositional and choreographic methodologies and our scientific drive to frame, analyse and make tangible an artistic process where we aim at revealing the patterns which influence the decision-making processes underlying the creation of a dance piece.

In a first phase its main aim was to design a behavioural task to analyse the factors and patterns which influence the decision-making process of a contemporary choreographer during the creation of a short performative piece with 4 dancers (April-May 2018). In a second phase (September-October 2018) we have invited Sylvia to ask and prompt the dancers to “illustrate” some of her main pre-choreographic concepts, namely Dodging and Scanning and their sub-categories as defined by her.

Sylvia has then, in her own words, “set up an analytical investigation to structure her empirical knowledge framed around cognitive attention and movement habitual patterns within an artistic dance practice poised to question and challenge the negotiation of “choice” in dance. Specifically, she has generated tools for compositional (Dodging) and typological (Scanning) movement possibilities, and (partly) superimposed them on a re-enacted map of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise Score”, which the dancers were invited to interpret.

For our last experiment, we have asked Sylvia to choose two different choreographic concepts (score X and scrore Y) to be used in her compositional process: one which would be very familiar to her from previous works and another which should be totally new to her and the dancers. At the end of the process, all the dancers would have worked with both scores. Other constraints were also suggested and enthusiastically accepted by the choreographer, such as the use of bio-medical sensors on her body and the limitation of the studio space in order to allow the video capture for motion tracking in 3D.

We have developed and provided alternative ways of seeing Sylvia’s choreographic process, both in the making of and in the form of a choreographic excerpt. We have done so by using methodologies from discourse analysis and gesture studies at first, in order to subsequently offer alternative perspectives on a dance creation process using new media: 3D point clouds, virtual reality, stereoscopic and high-speed photography, and animated infographics.