Let Me in Through Your Window

This is a new, and unexpected, scholarly book:

LO: TECH: POP: CULT

Screendance Remixed

Edited by Priscilla Guy, Alanna Thain

Routledge

ISBN: 9781003335887

2024

This edited collection assembles international perspectives from artists, academics, and curators in the field to bring the insights of screendance theory and practice back into conversations with critical methods, at the intersections of popular culture, low-tech media practices, dance, and movement studies, and the minoritarian perspectives of feminism, queer theory, critical race studies and more.

This book represents new vectors in screendance studies, featuring contributions by both artists and theoreticians, some of the most established voices in the field as well as the next generation of emerging scholars, artists, and curators. It builds on the foundational cartographies of screendance studies that attempted to sketch out what was particular to this practice. Sampling and reworking established forms of inquiry, artistic practice and spectatorial habits, and suspending and reorienting gestures into minoritarian forms, these conversations consider the affordances of screendance for reimaging the relations of bodies, technologies, and media today.

This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance studies, performance studies, cinema and media studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies.

The book contains the chapter:

“Let Me in Through Your Window”

Dancing with Kate Bush and Hatsune Miku

Hilary Bergen

This chapter emerges from a research-creation project conducted using MikuMikuDance (MMD), a freeware program where 3D digital models can be choreographed into various dance sequences through the use of motion data and keystroke animation. The program was originally produced for the Vocaloid character and Japanese hologram popstar, Hatsune Miku. In the resulting dance translation project, titled “Let Me in Through Your Window,” the author used her own body and a Microsoft Kinect to feed the choreography for British singer Kate Bush’s iconic song, “Wuthering Heights” into the MMD interface, prompting Miku and Bush to dance “together.” This chapter explores the ways in which dance choreography passes between bodies, virtual and organic, dispersing agency often attributed to humans alone. The author allows her datafied gestures to dance through and with Miku’s avatar, thereby relinquishing puppetry in exchange for the machine’s lively, glitchy output. Following Legacy Russell’s theory of glitch feminism, “Let Me in Through Your Window” proposes the glitch as an improvisational dance that resists choreographic hierarchies of control and MMD’s grid-like governance. Bergen’s project attends to the porous nature of dancing bodies in order to reveal moments of posthuman collectivity, contagion, and relation.