Motion Bank: An Archive Of Dancer’s Movements http://motionbank.org/en.html

The Motion Bank is a four-year data collection project of The Forsythe Company based in Frankfurt, aiming for the research and creation of on-line digital scores in choreographic practice.



Motion Bank choose three choreographers to examine their three respective choreographies to create on-line digital scores. Selected choreographers are from Europe and the U.S.: Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Bebe Miller, and Thomas Hauert. Each choreographer was chosen for her or his style and unique ways of working. For the variety of their process and styles of works, Motion Bank used different methodologies for each on-line score for each choreographies.

When you open the on-line score page, the pages read horizontally with multiple media of texts, graphic videos, and still pictures. You can go to each category by clicking one of them.

For the digital scoring methodologies, Motion Bank developed multiple methods:

• Graphic animations of the choreography which you can change your viewpoint and perspective of the video so you can watch the same choreography from the front, back, side, top, bottom and close-ups / distant view. Watching choreography in graphic animation is helpful to assess the movement patterns and rhythm of the choreography without being distracted by the characters of actual bodies.
• Simple geometric animations that explain the rhythm patterns of the choreography. You can also change the music for the same animation to see which music is the most effective.
• Human body graphic animation that you can watch and change the spatial patterns for each performer (objects) on stage (computer screen).
• The motion capture device to measure distances between two joints on movement and create a graph of these distances. A visual graph to see the changes in the distance between two body parts (side of the right ribcage and right elbow etc.) in one choreography is a unique and specific way to record a choreography.

In addition to these digital methodologies, analog methodologies are archived too. You can see many pages of handwriting score screenshots. Some choreographies have several notes from different performers for one choreography. You can see the differences in how each performer recorded the same choreography. As well as the above two methodologies there’s the traditional way of recording movement, which are video footage and sequential still pictures at rehearsals and on stage. Sequential still pictures of single movements are helpful to read one movement in detail. There’s also a lot of interviews and video recording of the conversations between performers so that viewers can understand the concept/ ideology behind the choreography and process. Since this archive is for the online score practice, many pages are proved for the process of the digital score production in text, visual, and video. There’s also a page for the viewers to learn how to annotate your own video /choreography.

For the entire website, you can watch many tutorial videos on how to navigate this archive and how to annotate your videos. Although this archive works for memorialization for the ephemeral art form and process as explained as Archive 1.0 in Ginnachi’s reading, the main purpose of this archive is social interactions as explained as Archive 3.0 in the same reading. In my opinion, each choreography itself is already an archive of movement so this archive, Motion Bank, is deriving from another archive (choreography) and offers a multiplicity of viewing platforms to capture the choreography through new technologies. This is a great learning tool to record/ perceive choreography in multiple ways which would possibly change the perspective to create a new choreography. This archive is an open-end archive. Viewers are encouraged to build their own annotation using own videos using their software PM3GO.
This archive is finished in 2014 but this project has evolved in touring workshops called Choreographic Coding Labs enacted in Europe and the U.S.

For the amounts of information and the complexities, I would say this archive is for dance artist, choreographers, dance students, or anyone who actively want to engage, record, and create live performances and scores. This archive also would appeal to digital artists who want to translate human movement into digital artworks.

Looking through the variety of the digital scoring styles, this archive opens the possibilities for merging digital and analog media in its process.