Description
A humanoid figure performs an Odissi dance sequence in three-dimensional space. The figure is comprised of geometrical shapes in bright green and blue: lines to indicate torso, limbs, and appendages, small squares to indicate joints. There are no recognizable facial features. However, the curvilinear traces created by the gestures, torso, feet, and neck leave the indelible marks of the human flesh that we deliberately erase in its digital renditions. Layered over the focal video in the top right corner is a smaller video of Kaustavi Sarkar performing the Odissi dance sequence from which the motion-capture movement data was generated.
Analysis
This video decreases the salience (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) of all other channels in order to emphasize the salience of gestural communicative channels. The avatar is ungendered and has no individual features. Such iconicity opens space for increased imaginative participation from the audience (McCloud 1994, 59); however, it also erases the embodied distinctions (gender, ethnicity, individuating features) of the original dancing composer. Due to the erasure of body, costume, space, makeup, and music, the primary culturally identifying features are the dancer's movements, from the vocabulary of the Odissi dance tradition.
The figure's minimalistic appearance means that it cannot perform the full range of expressive movement the dancer wishes to communicate (for example, delicate hand gestures, or Mudras). Furthermore, the mechanical visual aesthetic may risk completely masking the connection between its representation of abstract, digitally generated motion and its representation of a living human body. With this form of representation, however, the dancer-as-digital composer can choose to funnel the audience's attention almost exclusively to movement as the focal channel of expressive communication, in a way that is otherwise impossible in a live performance setting. Overall, this variation's barebones frame provides rich potential as an embodied "archive" (Campbell, 2016; Shipka, 2016) through which the dancer can critically investigate the moving self.
