Breaking Acts of Dance: Capturing, Tracing, and Figuring

Abstract

This text is inspired by several encounters. Firstly, our encounter with an artwork that combines dance, digital code, and projection. Secondly, our scholarly encounter with each other as scholars of performance studies and screen studies in thinking with this work about the meeting of dance and new technologies. From such combined and layered encounters—between dance and projection, between public art and scholarly reflection, and between complementary theoretical perspectives—in the following, we propose a set of conceptual contours to think about dance, technology, and also the street, as the site of encounter. These we develop through our combined perspectives on dance, performance, and motion capture (Laura) and on urban screens, media architecture, and projection art (Nanna), and our shared interest in developing theoretical concepts and methodological tools for thinking with art. Specifically, we are interested in how art works invite us to analyze the ways in which they respond to the world around us—how they reflect (on) perspectives on this world and propose specific ideas about the world through their specific engagement with it. From our collaborative thinking with dance and technology about dance and technology, we take up the work’s invitation to conceptualize its reflexive potential— in both senses of the word: as medium and as method. Thinking about the specificity of its working with the concepts of capturing, tracing and figuring, and of its site-specificity with hodos, meaning both “street” and “way” (Verhoeff, Urban Screens 2025), we ask how the work artistically and theoretically (and thereby also critically) speaks about the impact of new technologies on contemporary culture and society. And more specifically, how does it do so, precisely, on the level of the street? Keywords: breakdance, urban projection art, dance capture, tracing, figuring