Translating Idiosyncratic Dance Principles Into Music and Light

The performance work Embodied Machine employs several idiosyncratic dance principles as common foundations between choreography, music, and light. The establishment of these foundations is based on a translation of dance principles across different modalities. This process of translation involves the identification of the core aspects of each dance principle, the abstraction of these aspects into computational formalisms, and the re-mediation of the formalisms into perceivable outcomes through sound synthesis, music composition, light, and interaction design. This publication describes the selected dance principles and the process of their translation. It also provides information about the artistic and scientific context that is relevant for this work, namely the role of dance principles in contemporary dance, the inherent proximity between the moving body and music, the methods available for formalising dance principles, and examples of computational approaches for translating dance prinicples. Finally, the publication describes several scenes of the dance performance and highlights the principles that form part of each of them.