Falling Worlds

Falling Worlds began as an investigation into an idea, long accepted in many dance practices, that the dancing body is not simply a series of ‘poses’, but a dynamic, morphing, material entity that has both mass and volume. Traditional motion capture techniques record the movement of points on the body and interpolate them to compute a notional, virtual, ‘skeleton’ from which an avatar is constructed. While motion capture is an amazing technology, I wondered if perhaps we were missing something in relying on computational averages of joint positions to translate the movement of individual dancers. Humans need to move a material body comprised of soft tissue that has density, weight and a specific relation to gravity, as well as the ‘hard’ elements of joints and their ‘poses’.

Falling Worlds uses a new technology – Volumetric Capture – which defines the body through high resolution RGB and depth sensing data to capture the moving surface of the body. This approach privileges the body ‘as it is’ with its mass, its density, its shape and its soft tissue, rather than as it ‘should be’, according to biomechanical joint action modelling. After all, there are many movements, such as breathing, the undulation of the spine, that are not defined by individual joint rotations. Falling Worlds leans in to actual rather than computational bodies.

In this spirit, Falling Worlds incorporates dancers of a range of ages and career stages, from emerging dance artists to dancers in their 50’s and 60’s. Falling Worlds seeks to foreground individual dancers inhabiting and moving the bodies they are, which is, after all, what dance, at any age or stage of ability, is about.

By instantiating dancers as moving entities with mass and form in VR, Falling Worlds presents a new kind of dialogue between human and non/post human. The common language is gravity. In VR, everything moves with a force and a mass that is assigned to it. In Falling Worlds, dancers can enter this world, and the scenic manipulations of CG can interact poetically, forcefully, emotionally, within that common language. Falling Worlds is a manifestation of that dialogue - a co-choreography of virtual humans and environments.