Moving Collaborations: A Critical Inquiry Into Designing Creative Interactive Systems for Choreography

The use of technology in choreographic process has been encumbered by the richness of data in live human movement and the constraints of computation. While technology is often considered a tool in choreographic process, with developments it can participate as a collaborator by transforming and eliciting creative opportunities. We specifically define ’collaboration’ rather than ’tool’ to differentiate the nature of collaboration: a dynamic and iterative process with participation from both the user and the technology. This paper presents a contextual inquiry for an interactive system used to provoke creativity in choreographic process. Choreographic process is often distributed, relying on interactions between the choreographer and dancers to develop and evaluate movement material through exploration on different bodies. Based on this interaction model we choreographed and analyzed a dance work in order to design a set of features that support system collaboration in an intelligent choreographic system. Our contribution situates the design and practice of choreographic systems in theory to explore future design of iterative and provocative collaboration.