Visualizing Embodied Research: Dance Dramaturgy and Animated Infographic Films

This video essay introduces a new form of visualization of embodied research, called “animated infographic films.” In these films, techniques like motion graphics, 3D modeling and camera animation are used to invite the viewer to enter the choreographer’s studio. Here we invite you to come into the digitally re-created studio of Joao Fiadeiro and engage kinesthetically and empathetically with selected examples of his compositional and dramaturgical strategies. These infographic films are based on the results of a study on three signature solo works from different stages of Fiadeiro’s choreographic work. The research has been carried out within the framework of the BlackBox Arts and Cognition Project.


VIDEO ARTICLE TRANSCRIPT
He was the first case study of our project, amongst three main artists during the duration of BlackBox. We have accompanied Fiadeiro while he was creating his most recent solo works and performances, by filming workshops, by interviewing him, but above all by being present during the whole rehearsal processes.
Actually, BlackBox is in its essence about translating words, gestures, mental images and full-body enactments, into different kinds of visualizations, Jürgens and Fernandes: Visualizing Embodied Research 5 which will then work as our outreach products. In this sense, we have produced by now four animated infographics films, 3D representations and a one-hour long documentary on the work of João Fiadeiro, which are all available online in our collaborative platform. As a complement to BlackBox there is TKB, a Transmedia Knowledge-Base for performing arts, which works as an open and dynamic platform for all interested artists at national and international levels, and where most of the works of João Fiadeiro are also stored and freely available online.
[Website navigation] [Jürgens:] The BlackBox website provides detailed information about our case studies and research output. Here we navigate to the SOLOS | Enactments case study about three signature solo works by Fiadeiro. We are introduced to information about the performance cycle, as well as to the why and how of the animated infographic films we have produced.
This link will take you to an article providing detailed information about the making of the films. The column to the right lets you access the infographic film on the top, and provides a link to the conventional video documentary of the stage performance below.
We will now see extracts from the stage performance of a signature solo work entitled "Este corpo que me ocupa", which translates to English "This body that occupies me". At this very moment, a group of people enters a room. They came from different places, each in its own way and time. Between small talk and some greetings, they find their places in one of the sides of the space. Some are occupied with the reading of a text projected in the wall, others need more time to empty their bodies of the thoughts and activities of the day. They all notice that there is a fallen plant in the ground. Slowly, silence will be all they share. The rest is on hold.
[Texts read aloud in Portuguese during the performance:] In the empty streets of a city, in the middle of the night,… an undecided man side by side with a motionless plant,… a vaguely disturbing couple -from the point of view of an insomniac woman in the terrace of a 7th floor.
A man who abandoned a fallen plant and came back to the spot of the crime feeling terribly guilty.
The unexpected encounter between a plant doing as if it was dead, and a sciencefiction writer looking for some inspiration. Fiadeiro calls scene eight an "intermezzo". Here the audience is not presented with another hypothesis anymore, but rather with an affirmation. The text the audience hears describes the state of in-between-ness as an interval, as a prolonged situation of immobility.
Scene nine finally reveals the factual past of the fallen plant, which in reality has fallen off a stool. This is the instant of time studied during the entire work. Conceptually, the piece begins and ends here. Fiadeiro will not perform any further action. Instead, he asks audience members to replace him. The piece ends when the audience members accept his invitation and join him on the sofa.  Fiadeiro frequently visualizes essential concepts and ideas of his method graphically. Some graphic models have evolved over the years to complement the studio practice. These models have been designed and tested in close collaboration with many artists and theoreticians. The graphics use notions imported from geometry, mathematics or physics, combined with philosophical, social and artistic concepts. This film will re-create some of the CTR method's key concepts and graphic models, based on our own personal workshop experience, interviews and working sessions with Fiadeiro during our case study.

Graphic models developed by João Fiadeiro
Conventionally, time is perceived linearly. The dot marks where we are in the present and the lines indicate that we come from the past and are heading towards the future. Fiadeiro proposes that, besides looking at time in the conventional way, we zoom out and become aware that this timeline is, after all, part of a very large circle. The notion that time is circular helps to highlight a key premise of his work: that everything -actions, thoughts, ideas -have a lifespan and will eventually end. By accepting the end as a possibility, we become more sensitive to the conditions of the here and now, and minimize the influence of past experiences or future expectations in decision-making.
The CTR practitioner trains to inhibit the tendency to react immediately in a given situation. Time for decision-making expands and allows to perceive So far we have visualized this spiral movement as continuously growing. But if we take the complexity of an improvisation into consideration, we find that there are always different forces in relation to each other, which put the sustainability of the system constantly at risk.
Sustainability is the consequence of the meta-stability of the system. This is reached when a group of improvisers is able to avoid situations of too much convergence, which leads the action to a dead end, or too much divergence, which causes the system to disperse. Meta-stability is the improviser's ability to adapt to what the situation needs based on the principle of repetition with difference.
In conclusion, the spiral dynamic describes the nature of the processes happening inside Fiadeiro's circular perception of time.