Dance and technology—the art of the body and combinations of tools—have long been drawn to one another, from early body augmenting tools like pointes to the digitally augmented performances we see currently. Yet, the analog seems to have a richness and depth that is unattainable digitally. The backbone of digital information is always zeros and ones: it either is or is not, always a pre-calculated abstraction into numerical values. So are digitized gestures, whether captured by external trackers or Kinect cameras. They capture a sequence of snapshots into an abstracted version, a simplified model of the possible ranges of movement.

Erin Manning argues that the movement of a body, especially a dancer’s body, is a constantly oscillating interrelation between senses, thought, habit, and other bodies, including objects.¹ She argues that any movement is like walking: it’s habitual yet never entirely predictable, always in a dialogue with other ‘bodies’ around it. Movement can be seen as changing relationships, reactions to an emerging situation, improvisation.

In many instances, dance performances using technologies contain such tightly choreographed interactions that any room for the emergence of new relationships between bodies becomes impossible. Although results of the linkages between movement data and visuals can be spectacular, the problem remains that digitization imposes a degree of predictability to the range of movements that may emerge from a dancing body. More often than not, movement is augmented by projections merely mirroring and repeating it in some variations. Even though the body has its own limitations, its power—and that of dance, perhaps—is that it can continually reinvent itself through movement and through other bodies that move. This requires an open-ended, unpredictable dialogue between technological and human bodies.

The rigidity of digital performance technologies risks limiting the richness of unpredictable moving bodies in dance practices; yet, at the same time these technologies have an aesthetic power that can augment performances in interesting ways. How can we take the best of both worlds?

Brian Massumi suggests that although the analog is always in excess of the digital, this doesn’t imply that analog is ‘better’ or more interesting than digital.² In order to reinvent relations between bodies, we have to challenge ourselves to “think the co-operation of the digital and the analog, in self-varying continuity.” By creating a space for surprise on the technological end, and allowing it to recreate itself dynamically, flesh bodies and digital elements—whether sonic or visual—can enter into a more flexible, genuinely responsive dialogue.

The practice of livecoding, or improvisational coding performances, might offer a way for the digital to connect to the analog more responsively and spontaneously in dance practice. This performance practice requires coders to write code on the fly, often in front of an audience. Fluxus is one such environment for 3D graphics, music, and games that is often used for livecoding. The editor allows rapid and flexible adjustments, enabling the code itself to move, to be in a constant state of flux. Moreover, it allows the audience to sense their presence constantly, as code appears, changes, and disappears on top of the generated visuals.

Fluxus coders and contact improvisation dancers jammed together at Dancecoding, organized at SZOB|A|R|T in Budapest in 2011. A lively dialogue in movement appeared. Contact improvisation works off the idea of physical contact as a starting point for movement improvisation. A projection of an animated graphic can be part of such a movement dialogue as easily as a human body.

The ease of finding touch points and relational movement opens up a space for the livecoders to respond to the gestures and movement rhythms created by the dancers. They ‘moved’ the code to ‘move the movement.’

Although still abstracting bodies into numerical movement data, sometimes reproducing bodies by multiplying their superimposed artificial skeletons on the screen, code now acts as an expressive body, one that can move and be acted on. Dancers can resist, expand, mirror, counter, or flow with the movements of the code. With multiple projectors and livecoders present, dancers even can choose which to interact with at any given time.

Code then no longer simply represents in order to substitute for or mediate a moving body. As an improvisational movement-moving machine, coding can start contributing productively to the reinvention of relations between moving bodies. Rather than being pre-conceptualized and ordered logically, it becomes felt, sensed, expressed.