CORD/SDHS 2016 Conference Proceedings Table of Contents ABSTRACTS/PAPERS JoDEE ALLEN Imitation as Learning and Misrepresentation in Dance Video Games JEN AUBRECHT Rethinking Appropriation: The Reciprocal Appropriation of Yoga and American Modern Dance SÉRGIO BORDALO E SÁ “What Are You Looking At?” – The Representation of ‘African Dances’ in Portuguese Documentaries of the Colonial Period DOMINIQUE BOURASSA Cataloging the Intangible: A Martha Graham Case Study CAROL BROWN Shouting across the Centuries: Affective archives and the politics of transmission ROSELY CONZ Que Corpo É Esse? (What Body Is This?) – Grupo Corpo Brazilian Dance Company Under the Lenses of Antropofagia and Transculturation RAINY DEMERSON Ethnic Décor: People of Color as Props in Music Videos CAROLINA VARGA DINICU Preserving and Honoring the Guedra Through Transnational Performance KYMBERLEY FELTHAM Locating the Dance-Maker in the Sociopolitical Space: Movement and Movements in Contemporary South Africa JESSICA FIALA Agency & Self-Interpellation in Cross-Cultural Dance Practice JENNIFER FISHER Everything is Authentic Something: What is “real” if you consider dance’s relationship to shamanism and to “the experience economy” of commercial brands? JOAN CAROL FRIEDBERG It’s All Greek To Me… Or is it? Balkan Bandit Ballads and Identity Politics on Stage JAMEY GARNER The Body as Archive: In Search of Authenticity DORAN GEORGE Can We Have Sex? Michael Turinsky’s Dancing Against Compulsory Ableism STEPHANIE M. HART The Body as Archive: In Search of Authenticity CAROLYN HEBERT “If Amy Winehouse was a beehive then I guess I’m a blonde bob”: De/Constructing Sia’s fame through contemporary dance ADAIR LANDBORN Excavating Sensory Data: A Somatic Ethnography Revisited ROBSON LOURENÇO AND JÚLIA ZIVIANI VITIELLO The Influence of Anatomical Knowledge in John Weaver and Jean Georges Noverre’s Written Works ANASTASIA MCCAMMON Divided Bodies; Choreographies of Nationalism, Tradition, and Resistance on the Island of Cyprus RACHEL A. ORIOL The Phenomenon of Authenticity in Esmerelda Santiago’s Almost a Woman and The Turkish Lover LAURA PETTIBONE WRIGHT Organic Source Attribution and Transparency in Teaching Dance LAURA PETTIBONE WRIGHT AND CATHERINE THARIN Ralph Lee Collaborations with Erick Hawkins LUÍSA ROUBAUD Between Dance Floors and the Stage FREYA VASS-RHEE Melding an Ensemble at Memory’s Limits: William Forsythe's Whole in the Head PEGGE VISSICARO AND YIN DEJIN Entangled Lines of Flight: Self-Becoming Other among the Liangshan Dance Group in Xichang, Sichuan Province ANGÉLIQUE WILLKIE “Authentic as opposed to what?” The Role of the Interpreter in Producing Belief EMILY WRIGHT Consider It All Joy: the Embodiment of Struggle in American Evangelical Dance EMI YAGISHITA Isadora Duncan and the Japanese Performers: Sada Yacco, Hanako and Michio Ito Imitation as Learning and Misrepresentation in Dance Video Games JoDee Allen Abstract: The release of motion detectors on video game consoles opened up new possibilities in game design and game scholarship. These systems were designed to track player movement using a camera, and computer vision software, and as such provided an opportunity to study how these new gesture controlled interfaces affect player interaction with the virtual world. The new advent in gesture-mimetic gaming practices also created a platform for a previously unconquered domain: the commodification of popular dances through video games, raising questions on authenticity and access through this new medium. This paper examines how the immersive potential of mimetic game interfaces in dancing games provides dodgy access to uncritical reproductions of popular culture. The social consequence of this, depending on the narrative of the game, is inappropriate imitation of stereotyped cultural signifiers for the purposes of entertainment. Pausing on how the game design and narrative design might contribute to media curated street dance aesthetic by distancing dance from culture for: the purpose of accessibility and the creation of a sellable fetishized product. The connection between video games and dance is perhaps not obvious when picturing the proverbial video game player sitting on their couch, staring at a screen, playing a digital game via a hand-held controller. However new developments in video game consoles have made it possible for players to use their whole body to interface with video games. These new gaming technologies track movement, using various methods from wearable technology or hand- held devices to camera tracking, where the player’s body becomes the game controller. In 1988 and 1989 Nintendo developed the Power Pad and the Power Glove: the Power Pad was a specialized controller that players stood on and used their feet to control, and the Power Glove was a glove with buttons worn over a player’s hand and tracked the player’s hand gestures and button presses to control the game. These controllers represent the start of mimetic game interfaces where the movements of the player reflect ‘real’ movements of an appropriated real-life activity, such as fighting or sports, featured in the game. Then in 2006 came the release of the first generalized gesture console, the Nintendo Wii which opened up development to video game development companies were able then to design games for these consoles which led to a variety of different video games for each console. This shift towards gesture gaming began to draw attention from the game world or what’s on the screen to the player’s body in physical space (Jones and Thiruvathukal 2012). Most current dance video games are playable with the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox Kinect and the PlayStation Move consoles. Two popular console franchises are Dance Central (Harmonix 2010-2015) and Just Dance (Just Dance 2012). Fewer dance video games are made for mobile devices such as: Bounden (Bounden 2014) and Floor Kids (MERJ 2017). Probably the best-known dance video game however is still Dance Dance Revolution (Konami 1998), or known as just DDR to fans of the game. First launched as an arcade game machine playable with a specialized foot controlled game pad, then eventually as a home gaming experience playable with most of the commercial consoles listed earlier with a portable adaptation of the game pad. Generally the game play in the major dance video games, produced by the larger game studios (Harmonix, Konami, Ubisoft) can be summarized as: the player chooses a song from a list similar to a juke box style interface then physically imitate the choreography made for that song as it is shown on screen. In contrast, many other non-dance video games for more ‘traditional’ controllers (i.e. handheld controllers) are designed to allow players to engage somewhat in free play; where they have much greater freedom to choose what to do and how to do it within the crafted game world, and as such personalize their time spent experiencing the game to a greater degree. Bryan G. Behrenshausen argues, in his essay Toward a (Kin)Aesthetic of Video Gaming: The case of Dance Dance Revolution, that dance games as of yet do not allow this kind of free play. He cites Atkins when he says players usually have a relationship with games that involves what Atkins calls the ‘game gaze’, a “focus, always [...] not on what is before us or the ‘what happens next’ of traditionally unfolding narrative but on the ‘what happens next if I’, which places a player at the center of experience as its principal creator, necessarily engaged in an imaginative act, and always oriented towards the future” (Behrenshausen 2007). This ignition of curiosity in the player towards acting imaginatively gives players the agency to become co-creators in their gameplay experiences. Eric Zimmerman (game scholar, game designer and educator) reasons that this type of game design is based on systems thinking and “thereby leads to the kinds of improvisational problem-solving skills that will be critical for creative learning and work in the future” (Zimmerman n.d., 25). Only one dance game on the market approaches this type of systems thinking approach to dance gaming. In sharp contrast to the primarily frontal facing game-play of mimetic interfaces, Bounden, pushes the parameters of dance gaming by eliciting graceful spins from its’ players that move beautifully through 3D real-space. The spatially orientated puzzles are not shown through a gesture-mimetic interface but rather use a touch interface with more visually abstracted movement indicators on how to adjust the position and tilt of the device. This mobile game requires two players to remain physically connected and simulates the feel of a ‘pas de deux’ in ballet with its intricate twists, turns and sweeping arm gestures. While the game is still reliant on a screen, the mobility of the device and the brilliance of this video game design require the device be moved in ways that compel players to discover a dance together, rather than it being overtly prescribed (Allen 2015). Specialized gesture controllers highlight player movement but Graeme Kirkpatrick proposes player movement is an integral part of player experience in all video games, as discussed in his book Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (Kirkpatrick 2011). He states, “Movement is integral to all game play as it links the real world of the player to the virtual world of the game through the controller – both a traditional controller as well as gesture controllers” (Kirkpatrick 2011, 136). Ian Bogost uses the term Exergaming in reference to games that use these types of specialized gesture controllers because these games “hint at an intimate relation between physical movement —especially rhythmic, repetitive movement — and video game play itself” (Bogost 2007). For Bogost, these gesture based games proceduralize movement – agility, in such a way to produce the effects of exercise as a by product of gameplay. Some games do this through the game and system design but others achieve this through the use of an external rhetoric such as fitness or dance (Bogost 2007, 306).