Bodytext

Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley
Audio composition and software by Garth Paine

Research and development of Bodytext was supported by artists residencies at the Bundanon Trust, New South Wales, and the VIPRe Lab at the University of Western Sydney. The work premiered at Critical Path, Sydney as part of SEAM 2010. Further performances at Inspace, Edinburgh, and Woodend Barn, Banchory as part of DanceLive! 10.

R&D for <bodytext>, an earlier iteration of this work by Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley was presented at Digital Cultures Lab Nottingham Trent University, December 2005. An essay about this project - Biggs, S., S. Hawksley (2006) Memory Maps in Interactive Dance Environments. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Vol 2.2 pp.123-137.

Bodytext is a performance work that involves speech, movement and the body. A dancer's movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing real-time motion tracking, voice recognition, interpretative language systems, projection and granular audio synthesis. The acquired speech, a description of an imagined dance, is re-written through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the performer causing texts to interact and recombine with one another through their subsequent compositional arrangement. What is written is affected by the dance whilst the emerging recombinant descriptions determine what is danced. The work questions and seeks insight into the relations between kinaesthetic experience, memory, agency and language.