Dancers Increasingly Adopt Electronic Technology

Rachel Holdt’s “Considering Technology Integrated Dance Curriculum in Post-Secondary Education” paper, published in the new Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship (JEDS), considered a broad range of technology, including Facebook, that could enhance the overall process of educating dancers. But during the combined conference of the World Dance Alliance-Americas (WDA-A) and the Dance Critics Association (DCA) in Vancouver, BC, Canada during July 29-August 4 she and Duncan Holt (from UK’s University of Hull) discussed with Wilddancer some of the specific hardware and software tools that are already being applied to teaching specific techniques, to creating the scenery for the performance, and to the performance itself,. Projectors can play several roles, from pico projectors used with smartphones to play back a performer’s practice instantly so s/he can learn, to giant models that can be used with scrims to create instant scenery. Isadora software can create special effects for live performances, either pre-programmed or controlled in real time by a variety of devices. By using the Kinect camera that accompanies the Microsoft Xbox, or other control devices, performers can control the audio-visual support for their performances. And a host of gesture recognition systems is available that can create visual effects essentially only limited by the imagination and creativity of the user. (We also suspect that Google Glass will play a role, too, as Google is already sponsoring its use in filmmaking.)

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