Findings
We used the exercise with design students to learn to move from a distanced view to a bodily experiencing of objects. The exercise challenged the designers to progress from looking and touching objects to experiencing them from a first-person perspective through movement. On the one hand, the designers developed ways to translate observations and knowledge about an object into a movement. On the other hand, they articulated their embodied movement experiences and the physicality of the objects in words. The transactional process developed the designers’ capabilities to make connections between bodily experiences, material objects, and spontaneous collaborative action.
Communicating through movement
When dancing an object, Rita led the two co-participants through a dance choreography that they attempted to follow and multiply. Rita used a full body movement to communicate what the object was, how it moved, and how it could be interpreted. However, Rita’s co-dancers expressed confusion about the movement. They were throwing themselves on the floor and struggling to mimic Rita’s movements. The exercise was noticeably challenging for the designers, who are not performers or theatre practitioners. A designer would need a lot of imagination, freedom to express, and ability to let go of pre-existing ideals to throw themselves into the action. The movement is not one-to-one mimicking of the object, but more like an interpretive dance to communicate the object.
Dance the Object is an exercise from Charlot Lemoine’s training workshops (Lemoine 2013). The aim is to develop participants’ capabilities to explore physical objects through movement and choreography. In the exercise, one participant designs a movement choreography based on an object and through that choreography tries to help other people to guess what the object is – by being the object. All participants have previously worked with a collage of pre-selected objects before one of the objects is selected in secret. Dance the Object is done in a team of three people without words and with a whole body. It is live exploration, without rehearsals.
Changing terminology
Turning the object into movement choreography changed the way of talking about the object. Over the course of the exercise, the participants started to describe their experience from an object perspective. They were using language that described an experience from the object’s perspective rather than seeing it from a human’s intellectual perspective. Seen from a human perspective, the die would be thrown. But Sam was reflecting his experience from the object perspective: ‘A lot of times we were touching her on the back and then we fell.’ If they had done that intellectually, imagining an object perspective, the articulation of their experiences would have been different.
Breaking down the bodily movement
Through the iterative process of dancing, Rita and her two co-dancers developed strategies to break down the movement into fragments of smaller choreographies. After the first round of dance, Rita’s group started to reflect parts of the choreography. They focused on the quality of the movement: whether they were thrown or pushed from the head. The video shows how Sam scrubs his head during the reflection process. He went through the movement physically in smaller parts and tried to recall details of the touch. Sam was breaking down the movement physically instead of intellectualising it. The group then reflected upon the spatial aspects, such as the direction of movement from one level to another. Despite the reflective break down of the movement, the co-dancers could not connect their experience with the right object: a die. Rita could sense the confusion and refined her movement choreography. For the second trial, Rita assigned separate roles to herself and to one of the co-participants. She made a clear division, seen on the video: Sam is a human shaking the die and then casting it onto the floor, whereas Rita is the die rolling on the floor. By assigning human-object roles, Rita succeeded to break down the movement. She gave a better sense that the die is held from the centre and that it falls down on the floor. Through the second iteration, the co-participants succeeded in making the connection between the movement and the object, guessing that the object was a die.
- Pick an object from a shared collage of objects without other people seeing it. Wrap it up in paper and put it on a table.
- Team up with two other dancers. Improvise a movement choreography together based on the object: its shape, form, functionality, whatever you know about it. Be sensitive to your co-dancers and towards the object.
- Repeat the process to get a clearer definition for the people who are taking part and watching. The two other dancers are trying to guess what the object is by being the object.
- Stop after a while and ask the dancers and the rest of the group to guess what the object is. Try approaching from another perspective if nobody guesses.
- When somebody guesses the object, unwrap the object from the paper in a ceremonial way. Reveal it also if nobody guesses the object after several dance choreographies.
The task is to dance an object in a team of three, while other group members try to guess what the object is:
Choreographic and movement language
The participants developed and worked in a different language, namely in the language of choreography and movement. The participants had a hard time making a linguistic connection with the object on the basis of movement. Many things can fall down; it could have been a rolling ball, a wheel, or a hat. Of all the other options in the world, the process required the ability to process movement as a new language to make the connection that the object is a die. The students thus developed a choreographic language through the process of moving. Initially, when they could not yet guess the object, the language had not yet been established. Rita tried different communication strategies with new movements and different choreographies to fine-tune the language and express the object very precisely.
From an object to a human body
The limitations of the human body created restrictions that constrained the participants’ abilities to embody a cubic die using a human body. A mismatch between the square shape of the die and the organic shapes of the human body was the first barrier to overcome in attempting to translate the object to a bodily scale. Another challenge was that the essence of a die (and many other objects) is recognisable in action. A die standing still is difficult to communicate without combining it with the action of being cast, rolling on a surface, and finally ending up on one of the six sides. The human interaction with an object and the movement of the object affects how we perceive it. However, the essence of the exercise was not to try to mimic the movement that a die makes. The purpose was, rather, to get to the core of how a human, with the possibilities of the human body, can express the essence of an object.
Teaching method
Among performers, this exercise develops abilities to listen and respond to a partner. One needs to pay attention to the object, but also to the other performer, to get as close to the movement as possible. The exercise enhances physical abilities to transform objects into movement and bodily scale. The transformation of an object through a bodily medium develops vocabulary to talk about objects and break down choreographic experiences in a detailed manner. The performers are constantly trying to make sense and express their experience as the object rather than about the object, which changes the perspective of perceiving objects as embodied entities. Among object theatre performers and actors this exercise has not proven to be particularly easy because it requires thinking, communicating, and sensing through full body movement. Dancers and performers with physical theatre training are usually more nuanced in communicating through movement.