By Ashley Ferro-Murray, doctoral candidate in performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley
MOOCing? is a choreographic investigation of online instruction, an urgent matter within institutions of higher education. I was interested in making this dance because I was worried that dance departments were being left out of conversations about the future of higher education and online instruction. Meanwhile, dance is an art form predicated on liveness, presence, and corporeality - all topics that are central to debates over the efficacy of online learning. In an attempt to explore how dance might be central to understanding online learning, I decided to make what I think of as a meta-composition about online instruction in dance. The title of MOOCing? references increasingly popular "massive open online courses," or MOOCs, but the piece itself focuses more generally on the practice of distance-based collaborations. The twenty-minute dance is the product of Internet interactions between myself working in New York and six student choreographer/dancers in Berkeley, California. MOOCing? will be performed in a traditional live theater setting as a part of the Berkeley Dance Project at the University of California, Berkeley in April.
The rehearsal process for MOOCing? is a hybrid online and “on-land” process. The entire cast meets online one rehearsal weekly – each dancer on his or her own computer and in independent locations from which we converse and move together in a Google hangout. The other two weekly rehearsals happen with all of the dancers together in one space, and with myself choreographing from afar. For these on-land rehearsals we project my image on a large LCD screen in the dance studio and I watch and direct the dancers from the view of a webcam. In planning the piece I hoped that access to both online and an on-land learning environments would make an interesting juxtaposition in the dance and for the “meta” nature of questioning distance learning. Still, while the dancers interact with one another in the same physical space twice weekly, I am never physically present. I have only met one of the six dancers in person.
As an ensemble cast, MOOCing? performers consider what it means to learn movement from someone who is not physically present - who is at a distance. The cast asks, is it possible to bring the specificity of our physical place to each other through the means of the Internet? What does it mean to make traditionally physical dance from afar and online? Distinct from other types of technology-based distance collaboration such as teleimmersion and motion capture experiments, my cast and I focus specifically on pedagogical methods for making dances in the context of higher education. We use relatively accessible technologies as opposed to high-tech systems and devices.
We are currently in our sixth week of rehearsals and I can now confidently say that we have made a dance together – it’s working! We have a dance that consists of a lot of tableau work, a few phrases of movement based on the idea of connecting distant body parts (for example the left shoulder to the back of the right knee), and work with Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies to translate movements from one space to another. We have done a lot of work to translate movement phrases from one plane to another, one point to another, or one realm to another. We are also mapping our digital connections with string to physicalize our virtual experiences on the stage, and working with a set that consists of different platforms to invoke the process of moving together but from different locations.
We have found that focusing on a few modes of communicating over the Internet has actually deepened our physical practice. For one, talking has become more central to this choreographic process. In order to get to know one another, to be able to hear and understand each other clearly, we have had to have many more spoken conversations than I usually facilitate in rehearsals. We also use the webcam to get up close and personal with specific movements. I am able to zoom in on a specific part of my body with the camera to show each student details that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to if watching me from the other side of the studio. By focusing the webcam on my feet, or my hand, or a hip, I can use the gaze of the camera to guide my students’ focus.
This new mode of working has forced us to slow down the choreographic process and to reflect more on each action – verbally and corporeally, which we feel has deepened our engagement within the relatively rushed process of making a dance within the eight-week semester time slot. I’m also thrilled that we have been able to develop a real cast cohesion and trust among one another, even though we remain at a distance. Stay tuned for some blog-post updates about our process, how the piece is progressing, and specific obstacles that I face as a choreographer working with dancers across the country. You can also read some words by my students on our blog, moocing.wordpress.com.
----------------------