Centre for Dance Research

Description

The Centre for Dance Research is located within the Institute for Creative Cultures. The Centre specialises in an inclusive interdisciplinary approach to diverse forms of artistic and scholarly research in dance supported by new approaches to documentation, analysis and dissemination of choreographic creativity.

The Centre for Dance Research embraces leading edge research developments including reflexive enquiry into embodied practices, collective and political action, digitisation, cultural value and the expanded choreographic field. In addition, the Centre for Dance Research also seeks to investigate and critique the legal frameworks that can be used to support and empower the sector. The centre's research is both transdisciplinary and impactful.

The centre's core research themes are: dance documentation, dissemination and publication; cultural heritage and preservation; choreographic processes and somatic practices; dance digital and software studies; movement, computing and AI; interdisclipinarity and interculturalism; inclusivity and collectivity with a focus on disability in dance; critical discourse and performance philosophy; alternative performance sites and virtual reality; intellectual property and human rights; bodies, health and well-being; and practice research.

The centre is playing a key role in an initiative funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Bridging Responsible Artificial Intelligence Divides programme, in which researchers work with dancers and robots to explore how performance involving human-machine interaction can be archived, with a specific focus on human centred AI, disability and an ethics of care and on more inclusive ways of capturing data with and for disabled dancers. A second case study centres on the Siobhan Davies RePlay digital archive, exploring how AI might support the long-term sustainability and creative reuse of digital performance archives and how AI tools can help new audiences and artists discover, reinterpret and build on historical dance works. Centre researchers were also part of the team on the WhoLoDance project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme and running from 2016 to 2018, which experimented with using AI technology to teach a computer to recognise and interpret the bodily movements of a dancer, applying multimodal sensing and advanced motion capture technologies to transfer dance movements into digital data, with the aim of developing and training multi-modal feature extraction algorithms for the automatic identification and comparison of dance patterns and styles. The centre has worked at the intersection of dance and digital technology for a number of years and is expanding its research towards new considerations of what dance can offer to artificial intelligence and ethics in relation to the body.

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No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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Coventry University
Coventry