Perpetual Motion Electronic Mediations Series Editors: N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, and Samuel Weber Founding Editor: Mark Poster 59 Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common Harmony Bench 58 Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games Alenda Y. Chang 57 Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art James J. Hodge 56 Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed Fenwick McKelvey 55 What Is Information? Peter Janich 54 Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar Justin Joque 53 Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux 52 The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction Hugo Gernsback, edited by Grant Wythoff 51 The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, and Tamar Tembeck, Editors 50 Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction Timothy J. Welsh 49 Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet Jennifer Gabrys (continued on page 229) Perpetual Motion Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common Harmony Bench Electronic Mediations 59 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS MINNEAPOLIS LONDON This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Copyright 2020 by Harmony Bench Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bench, Harmony, author. Title: Perpetual motion : dance, digital cultures, and the common / Harmony Bench. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2020] | Series: Electronic mediations ; 59 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019009190 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0052-6 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0053-3 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Dance and the Internet. | Dance and technology. | Dance—Social aspects. | Interactive multimedia—Social aspects. Classification: LCC GV1588.7 .B46 2020 (print) | DDC 792.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009190 UMP BmB 2020 In memory of Jule and Georgia This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments / ix Introduction: Dance as Common / 1 1. Interactivity and Agency: Making- Common and the Limits of Difference / 19 2. Dance in Public: Of Common Spaces / 57 3. A World from a Crowd: Composing the Common / 99 4. Screen Sharing: Dance as Gift of the Common / 137 Notes / 189 Index / 221 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book would have been impossible without the contributions and support of family, friends, and colleagues. I have many people to thank at The Ohio State University, especially Candace Feck, Karen Eliot, Hannah Kosstrin, Susan Petry, Susan Hadley, Nena Couch, Shannon Winnubst, Ana Puga, Shilarna Stokes, Katey Borland, Paloma Martinez- Cruz, David Staley, Isaac Weiner, Leigh Bonds, and Mike Hardesty. My doctoral advi- sees Mair Culbreth, Alex Harlig, Kelly Klein, Janet Schroeder, Lyndsey Vader, and Benny Simon have been wonderful interlocutors and provo- cateurs along the way. I thank them for their intelligence and curiosity. Conversations with Victor Quintanilla, David Cook- Martín, and especially Elizabeth Kolkovich made the task of writing much easier. For offering generous feedback at many different stages of writing, I thank Eugene Holland, Clare Croft, Jeannine Murray-Román, Lynn Itagaki, Cindy Gar- cía, Ryan Skinner, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Kate Elswit, VK Preston, and Anthea Kraut. I remain grateful to Susan Leigh Foster for her consistent advocacy, counsel, and critique. I also thank my anonymous reviewers for their feedback and direction. Many thanks are due to Norton Owen, Arianna Brawley, and Pamela Tatge at Jacob’s Pillow, for supporting me with a research fellowship in 2016 during a final stretch of writing, and to Sherril Dodds, who provided invaluable feedback while I was a Visiting Scholar in Residence at Temple University. A 2017– 18 Faculty Professional Leave from The Ohio State Uni- versity provided the time and space to revise the manuscript. The folks at OSU’s STEAM Factory, especially Charlene Brenner, have been welcome ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS companions throughout, and I thank them for providing a space to write. A grant from the Open Access Monograph Initiative helped to realize the digital manifestation of this project, and for assistance with that I am especially thankful to Maureen Walsh, Meris Mandernach, and Sandra Enimil. Many thanks additionally go to the editors of the Electronic Medi- ations series, N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, and Samuel Weber, as well as the University of Minnesota Press, especially Danielle Kasprzak, Jason Weidemann, Mike Stoffel, and the indefatigable Anne Carter. Many thanks also to Holly Monteith for her copy editing. I am deeply appreciative to Jonah Bokaer for allowing me to use the cover image featuring his choreography. Thanks also go to Simon Ellis, Carolina San Juan, Sara Wolf, and Ali Potvin for their friendship. For sanity-preserving Friday nights on the patio, I wish to recognize the gang on “The Glen”: Mike, Rod, George, Georgia, Marcina, Suzanne, and Jeff. My parents, Mike and Sheree, siblings Alisa, Cameron, and Aubrey, their spouses, and many nieces and nephews have been both encouraging and grounding. Finally, thanks are not enough to convey my appreciation to Debra Burrington. Thank you for everything. Introduction Dance as Common I open my iPad, a second-generation model, and find the 2014 applica- tion Passe- Partout produced by the 2wice Arts Foundation. I tap the app’s icon and am greeted with what sounds to my ears like a confused piano. The work’s title appears onscreen, after which I am provided with a brief tutorial and then prompted to “tilt or tap dots to start.”1 I tap a gray dot, one of five different colors of dots on the left side of the screen. A duet begins between dancer Daniel Ulbricht and dancer- choreographer Justin Peck, both of the New York City Ballet. Both men wear gray shirts, and a gray bar extends across the screen to indicate the video’s progress. Despite New York Times dance writer Gia Kourlas assuring me that I’m the chore- ographer in her article on Passe- Partout,2 my first time through, I am com- fortable with my role as spectator and just watch the duet from beginning to end. The sequence is a friendly balletic competition of earthy athleti- cism that lasts about a minute. At the conclusion, I am invited to play back, share, or save the resulting video, or to start over. I start over. 2wice has produced a handful of iPad apps for dance, and I am curious to see how this one differs. I tilt the iPad one way, then another, then another. The men’s solos and duets fill the screen, overlapping and fading in or out in response to my movements. Colored bars streak across the screen, indicating where each of the five segments comes in and goes out. Producer Patsy Tarr tells Kourlas, “As you work with these layers, you start to see unison and sym- metry and repetition,” noting that the idea was to convey core principles 1 2 INTRODUCTION of choreography.3 My second time through, however, I don’t notice the men’s movement so much as my own, since it cues the different musical scores that accompany each scene. Am I doing it right? As the men’s danc- ing images proliferate onscreen, the sounds of piano, clarinet, marimbas, and harpsichord, among other instruments, layer atop each other as well. But because I’m tilting and moving the iPad, it’s difficult to track what the dancers are doing onscreen. On the next round, I intend to sit still and investigate Ulbricht’s move- ment qualities when accompanied by drumming in the pink sequence, but when I start over, the pink and blue dots have been replaced by red and white ones. I decide to use the dots to control the timing of each sequence. The dots double in diameter when I tap them, and the scenes overlap without fading unless I tap the corresponding dots again. The two ways of inter- acting with Passe- Partout— tilting or tapping— have rather different effects on the outcome. Kourlas coaches, “In this choreographic pursuit, there are Figure 1. Screenshot of choreographer and dancer Justin Peck (in foreground) and dancer Daniel Ulbricht in the iPad app Passe- Partout (2014). Concept and design by Abbott Miller, video by Ben Louis Nicholas, music by Aaron Severini. Produced by 2wice Arts Foundation. INTRODUCTION 3 no wrong choices. And unlike ballets for the stage, which disappear once the curtain falls, [these] can be saved or shared through social media.”4 I decide to play back the video of my arrangement. The dots and bars disap- pear, leaving only a video of the overlaid performances and sound scores. Peck and Ulbricht seem suspended as they dance in their all- white perfor- mance space, a prominent aesthetic used in dance-media. I am happy with the result and contemplate whether to post the video online. Many of the major formal devices this book explores around dance in digital cultures are visible in just the example of Passe- Partout: situating dance onscreen, employing repetitive and recombinatory approaches to composition, inviting users to have co- ownership in the creation of a dance experience, and enabling users to share the rendition of a work that results from their participation.