Digital Bridges to Dance
Introduction
Digital Bridges to Dance is a site to collect ongoing experiments in Digital Dance Making. The concept originated as a way to explore how the digital world and dance might play together.
In the summer of 2018, I joined the Digital Bridges to Dance project as a student doing a directed research project, Embodied Experiences in the Environment at Grinnell College. I continued to my work with the project when I joined the Vivero Digital Scholarship Fellowship Program at Grinnell College during the fall 2018 semester where I worked with Professor Celeste Miller of the Theatre and Dance department to create a digital archive for the Digital Bridges to Dance project.
Project Goals
The goals of the project were to:
explore online synchronous and synchronous collaborations,
create dances made purposefully to exist as digital works,
test methods for choreographers to collaborate across geographic distance for the purpose of professional artistic development,
create curriculum for dance-based experiential embodied practices that can be used by classroom teachers and community leaders,
and document the research and creative products of Professor Celeste Miller, M.F.A., and Grinnell College Student Researchers:
Summer MAP 2021: Halvor Bratland, Lilith Hafner;
2018-19 Vivero Fellow Obuchi Adikema ’21,
Summer Map 2018: Naomi Worob, Obuchi Adikema
Digital Humanities Researcher Summer 2017 Charlotte Richardson-Deppe ‘19
Contributions
My contributions to the Digital Bridges to Dance project came in two parts: first as a student research in the summer of 2018 and followed by becoming a Vivero Fellow and creating a digital archive of the digital media and text on the website.
I kept an active blog during the summer of 2018 with my fellow researchers as we explored different methods of collaborating and creating dances for a digital medium. I have chosen to highlight my posts The Cell Phone Camera and Performance and ACTIVITY: Personal Data Dance in the writing section of this site, but all of my original blog posts can be found of the official Digital Bridges to Dance site. I created and designed the website that hosted our blog where all of our research materials were kept throughout the summer. We ended the summer with a presentation at the 2018 Digital Bridges Symposium in Iowa City.
Archival Work
The archive I created as a Vivero Fellow is still hosted in Digital Grinnell, a collection that promotes “free inquiry and the open exchange of ideas” through the preservation and publication of scholarship created by Grinnell College students, faculty, and staff.
Reflections
This project was my first step into the world of the digital humanities and an arts-based research approach. Exploring research methods based in the arts expanded my view of what academic “work” can look like and who brought my attention to how creative voices can sometimes be downplayed in academic conversations.
