Synchronous Objects is still on the road showing up in cities far and wide from Beijing to Chicago and Zagreb to Bangalore. Of course you can always see it any time, any where online but The Goethe Institute has also made Synchronous Objects the subject of their Forsythe Module.

Curated by Petra Roggel, the Forsythe Module helps to share the work of Forsythe in locations not typically visited by the Company. We are doing this by exhibiting Synchronous Objects in a variety of installation formats: everything from working kiosks and interactive reading rooms like we did at the Wexner Center, Columbia College, SIGGRAPH etc. to immersive video installations that re-imagine the screen-based work in space and time as we did at ISEA-Rhur 2010 and will do next week at BADCo’s Symposium on choreography and software in Zagreb, Croatia and this summer at the Taipei Dance Festival alongside a large selection of Forsythe’s installation works.

Norah Zuniga Shaw (project co-creative director with Forsythe and Maria Palazzi) travels with the exhibitions to give public lectures and conduct interdisciplinary workshops. In 2010 the Goethe Institute sent Shaw and Synchronous Objects to the Tanzplatform and ISEA-Rhur 2010 in Germany and to Beijing, Taipei, and Tokyo. 2011 finds us in Croatia, Hungary, Turkey, Romania, India, Taiwan, Japan, New York City, Brazil, and beyond. Hope to see you around.

In my course, I ask students to analyze One Flat Thing, reproduced and Synchronous Objects with the suggestion that the disciplines of dance and interior design share many parallel characteristics. Both are based on spatio-temporal conditions. Both are situated in perceptions of experience. Both use systems of organization to construct logic and creative play. Interior space making is functional, creative choreography. And the structure of a body is architecture in itself. It is a salient architectonic form that interplays with dimensions of space and time. Space itself is pliable, active and alive (paraphrased from Merce Cunningham’s video Points in Space). Breath and air are essential to the body and to the space, rendering each kinesthetically dynamic. The body in motion designs the space and the space navigates the body’s movements.

With these parallels in mind the students analyze the dance through the lenses offered in Sync/O and through their own analytical processes. They then conduct a series of transformation exercises to produce abstract spatial configurations, manually and digitally. The student models evoke the subtleties they saw in the dance. Here is a sampling from the projects completed in 2009:

This object by student Jeremy Escalera brings the collective network of communication in the dance and the spatial distribution to the forefront.

by Jeremy Escalera

By Lisa Schmidt

We understand through Synchronous Objects that alignments are essential to how visual relationships are constructed in the dance. In this project by Stephanie Payton alignments between the dancers become shifting landscapes of three dimensional surfaces. They create an independent architecture of form and flow.

by Stephanie Payton

I look forward to seeing what the students create this spring and will be happy to share the results again on the blog.” – Susan Melsop

enjoy – nzshaw

“Synchronous Objects was the subject of the second lecture within a trilogy, which developed ideas from the “choreographic algorithm” to the “choreographic object” to the “choreographic construction”. All 3 lectures revolved around the work of William Forsythe.

The lecture series started with the analysis of Improvisation Technologies, which provided a rich database of dance operations and instructions. I found that they could be used in order to define a choreographic algorithm and as such create a dance piece. An algorithm is defined as a precisely described set of instructions.

The 3rd year dance students were asked to “fax” a ballet creating a simple choreographic algorithm based on the instructions/operations shown in the Improvisation Technologies CD. The remark of the architect Britta Callsen who had used Improvisation Technologies as an inspiration for her own project led me to my third lecture titled: Dance is Architecture in Motion. About the shared vocabulary of seemingly opposite art forms. Choreography and architectural planning as fundamental principles of organisation. Her remark is very insightful when it comes to analogies between architecture and dance:

“As an architect I sit in front of my computer, I click through the different menus of the CD and I get overwhelmed by a glaring similarity to the interface of my CAAD program.” (Britta Callsen 1995) When I asked her to name the similarities she responded: “With the CAAD program I construct a building with lines, polygons, circles which are basic geometric figures. I click the command ‘line’ to define two points and I draw a line between them. In order to view it in the right position I take the line and turn, twist, flip it in the virtual space. It is the same operation Forsythe demonstrates on his CD when he describes the relationship between parts of the body in motion.”

During this lecture the students were asked to develop a choreographic construction using orthographic drawings of a building (see image below). As they were keen to “manifest” those constructions in a dance piece they created work based on those constructions, which turned out to be very exciting material.

Example of a choreographic construction

Synchronous Objects was the subject of the second lecture in between the two I have just described. The idea of the choreographic object as Forsythe describes it seemed to sit well in between a choreographic algorithm – a well-defined yet clear and simple mathematical structure – and a choreographic construction – a complex, multi-layered, 4-dimensional construction of kinetic events.

Synchronous Objects was a real eye-opener to my students who said that they had never come across anything like that. Since knowing this tool they take their dance pieces apart and reassemble them on timelines; they develop cueing systems for their dancers; they look at the dance floor as a map etc. Since looking at the science inside One flat thing, reproduced they have become researchers of their own creative practical work.

Apart from the impact that Synchronous Objects had on my students I can say for myself that it clarified and thus resolved a contradiction of concepts about dance in my own mind. It made me realise that dance has left the dramatic performing arts world, which is still based on narratives. Choreography in my eyes is DESIGN as opposed to performing arts and it would be worth piloting an academic project based on a design syllabus rather than on a performing arts/drama syllabus.

Who is up for joining me on that?”

– Kristin McGuire

During spring quarter 2009 at the Ohio State University, the second year undergraduate architecture students participated in an Installation Studio which focused on William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced. This studio, which deals with material fabrication, notation and fundamental representational skills, is a required course for all second year architecture majors and thus eighty students divided into five sections were involved. Professor Stephen Turk, who taught one of these sections, describes the course:

“The installation studio is an annual design problem in which students are asked to take a design from an initial scheme to full size realization, producing all the documentation and providing all the labor necessary to build the work. This entails taking individually developed designs into a group construction phase which emphasizes the collaborative nature of architectural production, the complex problems of logistics and the coordination of many people’s efforts. Each year the installations are based upon research into a specific phenomenon and systems of mediation from related disciplines such as music, sculpture, painting and dance. In the past these have emphasized the architectural behaviors of light, sound and motion as students were asked to translate properties from one system of mediation to another, through notational, diagrammatic, material and formal exercises.

The specific nature of working with Forsythe’s choreographic work and the interdisciplinary nature of the Synchronous Objects project fit well with the traditional emphasis of the studio and offered the opportunity for the students to understand the working methods and critical thinking of another discipline. For the project, students were asked to carefully review the large amount of data provided by the web site to understand the underlying structures and systems within Forsythe’s choreography of One Flat Thing, reproduced. Having absorbed some of this information over the course of a week each student was asked to respond to this information by creating a design proposal, which would map these conditions into an analogous architectural construct. The intention was to produce a system that would register the complexity and structure of Forsythe’s dance and provide a spatial experience that recalled in an abstract and qualitative way both its temporal structures as well as its organizational system. The spatial experience would share characteristics with the preformative qualities of the dance and resonate with its conceptual thinking while working with newly emergent architectural qualities and material conditions within a specific site in our building. These sites already have a kind of latent choreographic set of behaviors related to the ways in which they are currently occupied and the way in which light, shadow, sound, view and other architectural conditions operate. These sites formed the basis of the second part of the project, but during this first phase the specifics of the sites were left relatively abstract to allow for an in depth investigation of the potentials of the choreographic structures to inform formal material and organizational behaviors in the proposed structure.

The logistical and organizational nature of architectural design and production shares many aspects with what might be considered choreographic thinking, as designers have to mobilize complex material processes and work through the issues of group dynamics to produce a structure in a limited amount of time. In many cases this is the first exposure that these students have had with the work of a contemporary choreographer and for most it is their first serious confrontation with the discipline of dance.“

1. Discovery-based pathway:
By design, there are many ways into the site and therefore many ways into understanding this dance and one great way to approach it is just to beginning clicking on images that interest you and follow your own path of discovery. As you do so, notice that every object includes a PROCESS CATALOG tab (on the left hand side of your screen). The process catalogs are small samplings of the hundreds of design ideas that we made during our research. They show you the visual thinking that goes into this kind of work and include comments from some of the makers. Every object also has key terms and a video of dance, and many include commentary and other features. You can click on the RELATED OBJECTS tab to move horizontally or you can always return home and let the objects slide by until you see something you like. Once you know what you’re looking for, the VIEW ALL OBJECTS link at the bottom of your screen will show you all twenty objects so you can easily get back to something you like.

2. Linear pathway starting with the dance
If you are someone who prefers a more linear pathway through the information then we suggest you begin where we began the project and that is with THE DANCE itself. In this full score interface you can view the dance in full, see our data as a moving score, hear commentary, and link to objects that will give you more visual information on specific aspects of structure in the dance. From THE DANCE we suggest you watch the ALLIGNMENT ANNOTATIONS and CUE ANNOTATIONS and click through some of the movement themes in the MOVEMENT MATERIAL INDEX. You’ll get a good feel for the dance and its systems of organization from those four objects. From there maybe you’ll want to look at some of the more abstract objects such as the DATA FAN or try out the tools, a user favorite is the COUNTERPOINT TOOL.

And finally, for some textual description, the introductory essays–the Dance, the Data, the Objects–explain each of the project’s core elements in more detail (the essays are available as pages here in the blog and under the introduction tab when you’re on the site).

These are a few ideas to start with, let us know if you’d like to hear more about a particular object or perhaps you have a pathway you’d suggest for others to follow. -nzshaw

Sync/O is part of a symposium this week called Explorationen 09. It is a really interesting group of people and PACT is a great arts center set in the midst of a refurbished wash house for the coal miners who used to make up the majority of the population in Essen, Germany. The architects who did the refurbishing have left the original tiles, mirrors, soap holders, and other features of the space giving it a haunting feeling of uses from the past. Now it houses artist residencies, dance performances (to my delight this week was British choreographer Jonathan Burrows), and symposia focusing on off-beat and interdisciplinary perspectives. Being here has inspired me to (finally) begin working on my book about Synchronous Objects and the creative research methods it required. -Norah

“Engaging with Synchronous Objects as a choreographer, I was very interested in how choreographic thinking is a way of knowing that offers new insight into other fields from geography, to computer programming, to architecture. I was also interested in the ways that other fields shed light on my own choreographic practices and turn my understanding of choreography inside out. In the process of creating I seek to undo what I think I know choreography is so that I can be open to inventive ways of working. Interacting with the Synchronous Objects website is a chance to re-think what choreography is, from a series of actions, to an example of counterpoint, to a study of the responsibilities and dependencies among a group—and the list goes on.

Up-ending my assumptions of what choreography is has several practical consequences that are evident as I create in the studio. Using the Synchronous Objects’ Counterpoint Tool, for instance, invites me to play with new ways of organizing the movement of a group through space or relating my limbs to each other in surprising ways. Synchronous Objects has expanded what choreography can look like and act like, and this alone has had a significant impact on how I think about my choreographic process. From the work of the interdisciplinary team that came together to create Synchronous Objects I come away with an inspiring methodology for collaboration. Congregating around common interests from a variety of angles yields not only insight into each distinct field, but articulates areas where expertise overlaps. What would it mean for my process if I asked an architect or geographer to join in, incorporating their sense of space and place into my work? What would it mean for an architect to consult me on a crowd’s movement through space before she designed an atrium in a hotel lobby? Synchronous Objects invites me to broaden my definition of the choreographic act into other fields, and notice the many ways that actions are organized, be it in the editing room of a filmmaker, or on the drawing board of a city planner. With one foot in the studio, and the other in several diverse disciplines, I feel inspired to jump into making a new piece with the desire to look for choreography everywhere.” —Lillian Skove

We invite your comments and let us know if you’re using the site and if you’d like to contribute a post to the blog.
—Norah

This week I’m in Amsterdam sharing Sync/O with a community of dance researchers called the Inside Movement Knowledge network here at Spring Dance in the Netherlands. This very interesting group of embodied thinkers is involved in a large project focusing on new ways of transmitting dance knowledge. They are dance educators, conservationists working in the visual arts on the preservation of installation and performance art works, choreographers, and academics concerned with understanding the nature of “corporeal literacy.” While here at Spring Dance I also had the opportunity to see Brazilian choreographer Bruno Belatrao’s new work “H3″ (he’ll be in London at Sadler’s Wells in May). It is a incredible work of choreographic counterpoint in a very different movement vocabulary than the one you see in “One Flat Thing, reproduced.” Watching the piece I was grateful to have had the training that this project has given my eye, I could see intricate patterns and structural forms in the piece in an entirely different way because of how Forsythe and our work with him has taught me to see alignments. I’m hoping our objects do this for others who explore Sync/O in a shorter time frame than the four years it took us to make the project. I’d be interested to know if anyone out there is noticing the ways that counterpoint and alignments can come into focus in other works and even other phenomena.
—Norah Zuniga Shaw, Amsterdam, NL