Capturing stillness: visualisations of dance through motion capture technologies

A three year Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts.
Capturing Stillness uses performance capture and computer game worlds to create transformative experiences derived from Skinner Releasing Dance Technique and its poetics. The study questions the relationships that arise between the poetic imagery cited in the pedagogy aligned with motion analysis, visualisation techniques and digital technologies & how these findings in combination with Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) principles can permeate the development of kinaesthetic Human Computer Interfaces for mobile devices and large scale projected realtime 3D environments.Seventeen dancers from across the globe were motion captured in the Bugatti Lab at Coventry University and motion.lab at Deakin University, Melbourne. Visualisations of the movement data incorporated into a series of new Augmented Reality and Stereoscopic Virtual Environments for CAVE & Virtual Reality headset. As the first study of its kind to interrogate SRT dance practice in the field of motion capture and interactive virtual environments, the project resulted in exhibitions, conference contributions, multimedia publications, didactic materials and various other events and public engagement activities.