Choreographic transductions across media: problems and objects in the Double Skin/Double Mind project

Abstract

The focus of this article is the individuation of choreographic knowledge in the context of the project Double Skin/Double Mind, developed by the research group Artistic Practice and Development at the Amsterdam School of the Arts around the joint work of choreographer and dancer Emio Greco and dramaturgist Pieter Scholten. The article exposes some problems associated with the conception and design of a series of multimedia objects, created with the intention of transmitting the choreographic knowledge of these artists through structures analogous to the organising concepts of the dances themselves. These concepts respond to principles of movement whose transmission occurs through transduction, both between bodies and between different media. Transduction is proposed here as an operation adequate to the thought of choreographic transmission, encompassing both the intensive and extensive expressions of dance and the abstract and concrete processes through which the associated knowledge emerges. The problems discussed here are concerned above all with the disparity between dance and choreographic writing as seen from the perspective of the difference between qualitative multiplicities and quantitative multiplicities. The research project Double Skin/Double Mind dealt with this set of problems regarding the transmission of choreographic knowledge in times of digital multimodality, not without having to deal with the diagrammatic and linguistic constraints necessary for the determination of a continuity of choreographic ideas through discontinuous bodies and media.