Practicing Odin Teatret’s Archive (POTA) is an interdisciplinary research project (2021-2025, 450K, 2 PhD students) funded by the Flanders Research Council (FWO). The aim is to investigate what it means to develop, practice and perform an archive through the activation of Odin Teatret’s (DK) embodied legacy in a virtual environment, addressing the translation of technique through Mixed Reality whilst developing dramaturgical approaches to archival practices.
By elaborating on hybrids of both physical and virtual spaces, we allow a user to drift towards a new awareness of embodied knowledge transmission, production and distribution, in which the freedom of a theatre laboratory provides the space for an interactive and creative encounter with codified artistic techniques and practices through virtual reality immersion.
In this sense, the archive becomes a dramaturgical tool for the actor, dancer and performer, an ‘architecture of access’ to find one’s way through the great amount of data available nowadays through lived experience. By treating archive/embodied heritage as an interactive tool where the main focus is on an interdisciplinary functionality of one’s experience, this research gives voice to its potential on fostering innovative expressive communication.
At the core of this project lies an intense translation chain: from psychophysical technique to metadata to an immersive textural architecture of archival navigation. We explore this chain by unfolding practices of translation that reveal further interdisciplinary training methods, built on cross-overs between politics of inventory and poetic equivalences that sustain the desires inherent to such re-enactments.
The different strands of translation practices shown here advocates for new discourses in the field, calling for more inclusive, dynamic, and interactive approaches to the preservation and dissemination of embodied knowledge, testing out AR’s capacity for paving the way for innovative approaches to knowledge production and dissemination in the performing arts.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christel Stalpaert (Ghent University)– director of S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media)
Co-Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Pieter-Jan Maes (Ghent University) – professor at IPEM (Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music)
PhD Researchers: Adriana La Selva and Ioulia Marouda (portfolio)
Black & white images (c) Bruno Freire
Thermal Experiments
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Experiments with thermal imaging aim to understand the complexity of the notion of energy within performance studies. By recognizing the heat of a users body while training with the archive, we are designing a system which feedbacks the user in real-time, generating different levels of complexity within a certain practice.
Slow Motion
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The slow motion exercise aims at creating a collective and continuous slow flow of movements, which demands the practitioner’s gravity center to shift constantly, according to the impulses given by other bodies and stimuli in the space (such as the breeze produced by other movements, heat, the sound of breath). Iben Nagel Rasmussen describes this continuous and collective flow as a ‘seaweed dance’. There is a sense of surrender and passivity to it, of being danced by the space, of becoming part of a larger ecological system. Paradoxically, the slow and improvisation-like character of this exercise allowed us to investigate with a certain degree of precision the interaction of the visitor with virtual objects in the designed training studio.
Slapstick
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Practices of Slapstick and Physical Comedy, performed by Gonzalo Alarcón (CH/BE) at ASIL- Oct 2021
Out of Balances Traces
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Design translation of exercise Out of Balance where users can visualize the remains of their movements. Following the opposite logic of slow motion, the precision of this exercise allowed us to explore how the virtual archive itself can ‘improvise’ with the visitors, creating scenarios of energetic traces in the virtual studio.
Out of Balance
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Out of Balance exercise, developed and performed by Iben Nagel Rasmussen at ASIL- Oct 2021. In this exercise, the body is brought out of balance and, just before it falls, the descent is interrupted by one leg. With a fast twist in the opposite direction, the force that was pulling the body down becomes an “upward thrust” (Galli et al. 208), moving to an opposite direction, so the energy that was supposed to end in a collision with the floor is thrown back into the space, generating another out of balance opportunity. This continuous flow of falls and recoveries asks the performer to endlessly look for their limits. By triggering what one could call a crisis in the body, energy is constantly being re-directed into space. Going further, this energetic re-direction – a resolution of the triggered crisis and the beginning of a new one – works as a dramaturgical practice in physical training. In this sense and following the opposite logic of slow motion, the precision of this exercise allowed us to explore how the virtual archive itself can ‘improvise’ with the visitors, creating scenarios of energetic traces in the virtual studio.
Navigation
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Pilot navigation menu. After putting on the VR headset, the participant becomes immersed inside a spacious virtual room with wooden floors, warm hues, and plenty of light, reminiscent of a dance training space. Participants are prompted to locate a small virtual sphere adjacent to them, featuring a Menu header. Upon interaction with the ball, a three-dimensional (3D) menu unfolds, presenting three additional spheres corresponding to distinct exercises. Each exercise path bifurcates into two main trajectories, namely Resources and Training Room, affording the trainee non-linear navigation unrestricted by a predetermined storyline. The Resources path facilitates non-interactive engagement, allowing participants to observe or follow an abstract human-like avatar demonstrating specific exercises. The menu unfolds once again and they can choose between Poetic Demonstrations or Technical Demonstrations, which are differentiated by how free-flowing or precise the movement is. The full-body performances of the three exercises. When the participant selects the Training Room option, the menu choices vanish, allowing engagement with the exercises as an interactive experience. Each exercise undergoes a translation into an experience using a metaphor8 integral to its core learning, and subsequently, a distinct set of techniques is deployed for its realization in VR.
Sounding Practices
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Compilation of sounding practices (vocal work with texts, songs, embodied vocalization) developed by LUME Teatro (BR), recorded at ASIL- Mar 2024.
House Of Rhythm
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A rhythmic exercise called House of Rhythm developed and performed by Marije Nie, recorded at ASIL- Oct 2021
Guesture Recognition
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What would it mean to enter an archive by moving with it? How will one’s movements evoke practices, a certain kind of knowledge to be unlocked? What would ‘keyactions’ look like? After several iterations of the project, we incorporated gestural recognition using an AI model as an entry point to the archive. As participants enter the virtual training room, they are called to perform a gesture reminiscent of one of the exercises. In this context, a gesture is a series of movements lasting a few seconds that captures the essence of one exercise. We chose to use AI as a tool for co-creation, allowing participants to enter and navigate the archive through their movements rather than through menus and buttons. The current state of AI enables us to create a classification of movements based on gestures, resulting in a simplified taxonomy that focuses primarily on hand movements. In addition, gesture as a means of documentation omits the intricate relationships that make them possible. We acknowledge gestures represent only a fraction of the quality of an exercise. However, the simplicity and ambiguity of the performed gestures can foster an oracular relationship with the virtual archive, which is not used, but activated through dialogue with visitors.
Experiment Textures
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After an intense period of experiments with the data captured, we came to realise that the heart of an affective translation process from embodied knowledge to data lies in the texture of the archive, the (virtual) space in-between the user and a practitioner’s avatar. The textures of the designed virtual environments impose several constraints that create a ground for defiance of physical rules and experimentation with invisible forces and qualities – as if the users could carve the air of the virtual (im)material space, allowing different kinds of resistance to be at play. This communicative fabric has been designed by us in the virtual space, constantly being tested in order to set the right environmental constraints that will articulate the conditions for extra-daily action, for new energetic qualities to appear in the body of the participant, of the virtual archive. They were designed with and for the body, allowing a porous and dynamic exchange. To interact with these environments and their constraints is, we argue, to align one’s actions in counterpoint to the modulations of the designed textures, understanding the affordances – the potential – of the virtual for theatre training.
Dance of the Snake
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Dance of the Snake exercise and visualization of sensors, developed and performed by Roberta Carreri, recorded at ASIL- Sep 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_in_the_Egg#/media/File:Concert_in_the_Egg.jpgGone for Eggs