Preventing the Inevitable - 07/08/18

After weeks of feeling like I've made no progress and the beginnings of stress creeping up on me, I decided it was time to have a meeting with my tutor to discuss what has been going on. I've been putting off this meeting as I felt like I had nothing to show from my research, apart from a few videos documenting more failures then successes. I updated her on how much the project has changed, from programming the drone, to no longer programming the drone, from interacting with it, to attempting to tether it. 

As she watched a few videos, what she noticed was how I move with the drone, her attention seemed to be more on what I'm doing, rather than the drone, asking me whether interacting with the drone has potentially changed my movement vocabulary. Arguably, my movement has changed, as I'm not used to moving in such close proximity to a flying object. But when interacting with the drone I still don't feel like what I am doing is dancing. I feel as though I am stood there occasionally walking or lifting an arm to see if the drone reacts.

She encouraged me to look more closely at my movement and create phrases based on this new vocabulary. This actually brings me back to another research question, looking at how new technology sparked the introduction of the post-human condition. How can I portray this post-humanism in my dancing, and how does the drone affect my body and somatic awareness. I realised there is potentially a lot more research to be done here. And this may help lead me in a direction where progress can be made. 

That being said I attempted to move with the drone in my hand, imagining it has just died out of battery and my movement is as if I'm trying to encourage it to keep flying. I improvised to see what came naturally, as I have never experienced dancing with a prop before and the result seemed to be taking me somewhere, perhaps something I could consider including in my piece, maybe even just as a contingency plan should the battery fail on me mid-performance.

However, I received mixed reviews on this, as test audiences stated that this reduces the potential of my piece, which is to move with an advanced piece of flying technology, to moving with an inanimate object. With this in mind, I've kept the movement quality that I created, and I will attempt to incorporate this with the drone flying around me also.