Choreoscope - International Dance Film Festival Barcelona

Exhibition

Festival | 07-19.11.2017 | Lecture room

What is it?

The Dance Video Games Exhibition is a dance experience that uses video games and an arcade style format as a vehicle for live performance.

As a dancer JoDee Allen has always been interested in body movement, and through her research she has proven that video games are a way to take up dancing. Even on a small scale, playing video games is like choreography: the way you move your hands, how you execute rehearsed, error-free, timed sequences, etc. With that in mind Allen has focused her artistic research on the fusion of dance and video games. How the player moves in these video games is crucial because it connects the real world with the virtual world through a controller. Video games make people move.

In the last two decades consoles and controllers have started to think about the player's entire body. Instead of using their hands, players can use their feet to press buttons and now cameras have even been used to track their movements.

Thanks to these technological innovations dance video games were born.

Let's go a bit deeper

Both dancing and playing video games involve moving your body in ways that could be considered controversial and both of them involve gender politics. Video games tend to cater towards male interests, while dancing is usually considered feminine. Despite this, the development of motion control consoles (Wii, Kinect, Move) and mobile phones (iPhone, Android) has provided an unprecedented variety of games and fans.

This Dance Video Games Exhibition is aimed at democratising access to both video games and dance by carefully redesigning how we experience traditional arcade video games. The exhibition is a meeting point that brings together alternative video games made by independent artists and companies with the popular AAA video games made by bigger companies.

JODEE ALLEN

I also make video games!

Besides my research on dance video games, I also make creative projects modelled on them. In my work I strive to broaden the definition of dance and in Pixel Dance I'm exploring the power of animation and dance as storytelling devices. In Floor Kids I designed the control scheme by coming up with the gesture interface that the player uses to interact with the game (essentially choreography for the player).

What should you see?

The showing of my Game Choreographies video series: an exploration of animation and movement in video games. Video games are interactive; you control your avatar by moving the controller. In these videos I use avatars from video games as dancers to produce choreography. Through this work I reflect on how women are animated in video games and I focus my attention on inactive states —when the avatar is motionless— and also on animation cycles. Movement in video games is also circular. There is a beginning and an end for all sequences. This series taps into that special feature through the lens of a dance video game.

About me

I am a choreographer and a b-girl (female break-dancer) with more than fifteen years of experience. I was a founding member and the co-artistic director for the dance company Solid State Breakdance. I completed my Master of Arts degree at Concordia University and my research covers everything from the study of gesture-controlled digital gaming and the “monkey see, monkey do” relationship between the player and the game, to competitive street dances and social game play practices. I have also worked as a video game designer on Floor Kids for Nintendo Switch, which comes out in 2018.

Let the games begin!

DOWNLOAD PRESS KIT

Links

http://choreoscope.com

https://www.facebook.com/choreoscope/

https://www.instagram.com/choreoscope/

https://twitter.com/ChoreoscopeFest

Cartell-Choreoscope