DANZ QUARTERLY No 1 September 2005

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Architecture and Movement – new spatial relationships

By Francesca Horsley

As dancers move, their trajectory creates a pathway through space, occupying and filling it, before moving on. Architects, too, are concerned with space, and their constructions also occupy and fill space.

This mutual interest with space has brought two disciplines together in a unique investigation. Felicity Molloy, until recently a Senior Academic Member of staff (Dance) at SPASA – Unitec’s School of Performing and Screen Arts teamed up with her colleagues Debora Laub and Philippe Campays from ScALA – the School of Architecture and
Landscape Architecture, to explore this relationship for an innovative architectural studio project that used the way dancers think about and occupy space to inspire the imagination of architects, who then go on to design buildings for people to inhabit.

Felicity said the project, which began last year, was not intended to try and change architecture. It was intended to stimulate the way architecture students thought about designing for the people who will inhabit the spaces they create.

“Debora, a Brazilian architect, had been coming to my ballet classes at Unitec, and approached me with the idea of working on a new studio project together with Philippe who is from France. Her specific area is in essential urban
architecture and Philippe’s is sacred architecture. Both of them were interested in the idea of the body as scaffold,” she says.

“It was interesting because in the somatic work I do, there is a lot of use of internal imagery and body awareness practice. Unitec students study this and become quite skilled. So it seemed easy to incorporate the somatic
practice of using imagery about the body to talk to architects about internal scaffolding, the layering of tissues, torsion of muscles, perception and subtle gesture.”

The architectural project, or studio, brought together students from different years in the architecture degree, (called vertical streaming), and culminated in a tangible outcome, an architectural proposition. Unitec dance students
were invited to participate, attracting a mixed range of second and third year dancers as well as graduates and other
interested dancers. “The first time we did the project we took six weeks, but in the second project we intensified it into ten days.”

In all, there were five stages. The first class was about somatic awareness, where architectural students were introduced to body mapping.“We did this exercise where I asked the architecture students to sit on the floor and see
if they could feel their sitz bones. I then asked them to trace their bones on a sheet of paper. Then I looked at the sheets and asked, does it look like a building to you? And they all went ‘ooooh’. It seems really simple but I think that
knowing about their sitz bones or their collar bones or their spine is a way of activating an understanding about their body as structure.”

They were then asked to work in groups and make an installation based on a drawing, using the body as reference and large enough for a human to enter. When it was finished, they took photographs of the drawings and sculptures and these were projected as a video image on a screen. The dancers were asked to respond to the drawing and sculpture. “They were materializing the architects’ imagination; embodying it.”

This in turn evoked a response from the architecture students. “They realised that what they were making was being witnessed by other people, which was more than just a materialisation of an idea. “One particular structure developed from the idea of a rib. The dancers’ response emphasised the idea of entrance and exit, in particular a sort of ethereal feeling about the entrance.” Another structure was a huge muscle, made of newspaper that spilled out from the Unitec gym wall. ”It was beautiful, all stories of the world written on this paper - it’s like the story of an experienced world written on muscle tissue.”

In the following discussions, the dancers talked about why they would decide on an image or what evoked a certain feeling they were trying to track through their own gestural movement.“The dancers were using their bodies to express a feeling or moment as they looked at the buildings. This particular form of engagement with an object was then translated back to the architects.” These discussions became very important– the dancers moving, the architects seeing, the architects making, the dancers responding.

“The immediate intensity of the artwork and the drawings were really beautiful. The architects became aware that there was another group of people on the planet who were as involved with space and construction as they were, but in a different way.”

The next stage was for the architects to record and map the movement. These actions were digitalised, using a video or photographic record - pixilated or the slow-coding of an action, arc or tunnel of movement. This sequencing through motion capture provoked some fairly esoteric responses. One group even tried to measure the absence of movement. They captured three dancers moving together but realised there were spaces in between where the dancers never went. “They tried to capture that space and record the speed of the space. “It became quite intense
really, the idea of void, spaces in a room that you don’t go.”

After this process the architects had to choose one element or one principle that was being evoked by the response from the dancers. They then used this as an idea for another architectural proposition or sculpture.

Felicity - observing from a less technical perspective – then began to see buildings as a slow motion form. “Very slow motion; buildings respond slowly. For example, I have lit a fire in this room, so the whole room is encompassed by the warmth emanating fireplace. This changes the way we sit and feel etc.”

Felicity said the dancers were really aware, moved well in the context, often very accurately expressing the
installation. “They weren’t trying to perform – but were responding to the images and to the installation. They realised their bodies were able to be traced in space – in slow motion and in an abstract and sculptural way.”

The final stage was for the architects to create a proposition for a building. In the initial Spacemaking Project it was to develop an interactive stage set or a dance performance pavilion. The second architectural proposition was a dance performance pavilion or an intervention for a landscape.

One student’s final building was a design for a dance theatre with different planes and a moveable floor. “If we could have a theatre like this in our environment, we would love it – imagine dancers having that building.”

The next step - yet to happen – could be to take it back into the dance realm, such as a site specific performance. “We are not sure whether that would be continuing this innovation and research or just doing an exercise because it would have another outcome. At the moment we are trying to keep this project in the realm of explorative experimental work, rather than having this as culmination.”

The report on the Spacemaking Project has been presented at two inrwenational conferences this year. Felicity presented at the Society of Dance History Scholars held in Chicago, for people interested in developing a political
social context through the medium of dance. Both Debora and Felicity attended a conference entitled “Transnet/
Transdisciplinary” at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where they gave a more informal presentation. This conference placed emphasis on the way science currently actively explores intersections with art forms like
dance.

On the last leg of the trip, Debora and Felicity presented at the gargantuan XXII World Congress of Architecture, held in Istanbul. “There were superstar architects attending and we were just this little group, but we had a really good session, with people asking some interested questions. In fact we had good responses everywhere.”

It has to be said that Felicity’s partner Chris Priestley funded her trip. “His generosity provided an amazing opportunity to deliver this innovative project across a number of international and cross disciplinary platforms.” In New Zealand the research has been published in the Humanities Research Network, and they have also produced a booklet.

Felicity found the project nurturing. “Here were a group of people making something for dancers – they were interested enough in dance people to make something for them. For me this counters the commonly projected
notion of the vagabond, the poverty stricken, the marginalised contemporary dancer. These wonderful people were saying we want to make something beautiful and further evoke what you do.”

“What made me feel excited about this project was that the imagery laden language a dancer uses to articulate movement perception, gesture and relationship connection with another human is transferable. We have got
something that is available and can apply to other disciplines.”

Return to Contents page of DANZ QUARTERLY N0 1 September 2005