Digital Dance-theatre as a Multidimensional Romance Notes on the production of C8's Flatland

This paper is an account of practice-based research and artistic work carried out by the authors in the field of digital dance theatre (C8’s Flatland). The work addresses the question of body-machine interaction from the point of view of a relationship (or digital romance), involving continuous and discontinuous processes of movement characteristic both to humans and technological machines. The essay explores Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s notion of ‘multidimensional graphism’ to speak of a type of digital writing that does not give prevalence to textual writing, to choreographic writing (or the virtual embodied writing of dance), to visuals, or code, but which functions as an amalgam of all these. We speak to Brian Rotman’a idea of gesturo-haptic language, as a kind of lingua franca that enables machines and bodies to relate to one another as part of the same intercommunictaional transaction, and as part of the same creative process for the emergence, and self-emergence of multidimensional artistic form

Performance/mathematics: a dramatisation of mathematical methods

This essay conceptualises the notion of performance mathematics in terms of a paradoxical relationship with the constructed notion of truth, which is shared by theatrical and mathematical performance. Specifically, I argue that these two disciplines can and cannot be reconciled with truthfulness. Grounding my comparison on the notion of an axiomatic method common to both disciplines, I argue that theatrical and mathematical performance can speak of truths only when these truths are properly staged or methodologically grounded according to the internal rules and conditions laid out by each discipline. But in the same way that these truths can be constructed, or they can be done, so they can be undone. Arguing that mathematics can be described as a performance of specific outcomes involving abstract objects and functions, I trace a cross-disciplinary comparative analysis of performance elements (especially axioms and functions), drawing on a number of theatre and mathematical theories. Some suggestions are also put forward in terms of the connection between the performance of mathematised texts and computational mathematics, particularly in terms of an inherent poetics and theatricality inside the performance-oriented, mathematised languages of digital computing

Theatres of the Surd: A Study of Mathematical Influences in European Avant-garde Theatre

This doctoral dissertation deals with the somewhat neglected relationship between mathematics and theatre. Specifically, the focus of this study is the penetration of modern mathematical thinking into European avant-garde theatre during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly as regards the revolutionary experiments on scenic space and dramatic logic that occurred at the time. I will argue that modern European theatre underwent a period of crisis, whereby a number of avant-garde practitioners renounced the axioms of traditional theatre, particularly in relationship to the rule of mimesis, representation, and verbal speech. Theatres of the Surd argues for a penetration of symbolic languages in the wake of a decline of word-based textuality in the theatre, combined with a cultural shift toward more abstract, technologically mediated and autonomous forms of theatrical practice. This work focuses on three seminal theatre practitioners of the late 19th and early 20th century avant-garde; namely, Alfred Jarry, Stanislaw Witkiewicz and Samuel Beckett, and the impact of non-Euclidean geometry and modern mathematical logic in their work. I will claim that the mathematisation of cultural practices in the late modern era marked a crucial watershed that played an important role in the transformation of the axiomatics of theatrical practice, and the emergence of a truly modern, post-Aristotelian and post-representational form of theatrical praxis. Thus, mathematics may be said to function within the ambit of cultural dynamics, insofar as its penetration into culture discourse and practice has helped modernise the way theatre is conceptualised and visualised

Mathematics in Motion: a Comparative Analysis of the Stage Works of Schlemmer and Kandinsky at the Bauhaus

This essay looks at the seminal work of Bauhaus practitioners Wassily Kandinksy and Oskar Schlemmer in terms of their multidisciplinary approach to the performing arts, and the dance in particular. Whilst their contribution has been widely recognized in terms of a cross-pollination of ideas from the fine arts to the performing arts, this essay also addresses the influence that compositional methods, based on techniques derived from figural drawing, as well as the study of form and geometry, might have had in their choreographic practice. I argue that despite stylistic similarities, these works present a divergent approach to the question of a geometrized motion design, which Schlemmer called ‘mathematics in motion’. I discuss the concept of ‘abstract dance’ promoted by Kandinsky, in terms of a visualistic method, where movement is rendered both as a succession of still images and as an imaginary process. Schlemmer, on the other hand, promoted a synthesis of abstract and physical, as part of a model for live performance known as ‘balletic mathematics’. I expand on this distinction in terms of a differential sense schematic approach to movement, one being visual, the other proprioceptive. Landmark works produced by these artists during the Bauhaus years (1922–1933) are called upon as case studies, including Kandinsky's Dance Curves (after Gret Palucca), and Schlemmer's renowned Stäbetanz