and the performance quality is subtly but noticeably changed for both the audience and the dancer. True it is possible to use off the body sensors and the dancer’s relationship with them in a less mannered and more random fashion, which is fine if you are not looking for precision or delicate and finite levels of interaction, and a more complex and coexistent composition. For us improvisation in this manner has never been creatively satisfying. Also this type of dancer/sensor relationship does tend to produce something of a strange occurrence on stage which is produced by the fact that although the audience can clearly see the sensor or the active area of the stage the dancer appears either to be ignorant of it or is being aloof. It is often difficult for an audience to make a reconciliation between the dancers state of beautiful ignorance and isolation, and the opportunity for interactivity – for the dialogue between two art forms – which is clearly presenting itself. The audience is placed in a double bind situation where technically they can appreciate that there is an element of cause-and effect to what they are seeing, but dramatically there is nothing there in terms of language and dialogue. It’s like one person who is speaking French to another who only understands and speaks Italian. In the end they revert to large hand signs and gestures in order to communicate. Sometimes we get the impression that new technology is taking the role of those signs and large gestures.

Computers provide a very powerful means of measuring, translating and quantising certain basic characteristics of art forms. For instance, it is possible, with ‘MAX’ and an on the body sensor for instance, to count how many times a dancer bends his or her leg. What can a composer do with that information – well he can say that at the 10th bend, a particular sound, sample or music event will be triggered. Fine, a computer can do this very easily. In this example, where is the dialogue between movement and music? It is the computer which counts the number of bends, and it is the computer which initiates the music on the 10th bend, of course it was the composer who designed the MAX patch to do this, but let us not fool ourselves, it is the dancer and the computer who take the ‘active’ parts in this dialogue and because this is a discrete ‘retrospective’ dialogue, it is difficult for an audience to appreciate it in the ‘present’ moment of performance. Although, it is possible to gain a technical appreciation of this type of cross-art-platform work, is it a technical appreciation that we are after?

Sometimes new technology is such a powerful and seductive element within a process in which you are attempting to open up new aesthetic territories, that it is easy to fall into the trap of wanting to exploit all its technical capabilities and in so doing misplace the artistic dialogue.

So far we have given some fairly extreme examples in order to highlight some of the basic problems we faced in our attempt to create collaborative work through the use of new technology.

In attempting to liberate the dancer by providing him/her with the means of controlling and manipulating sound, in attempting to reduce the gap between composer and choreographer, in attempting to create an interface between dance and music through the use of new technology we had created another gap, the gap between interactive and non-interactive. And we were forced to address the nature of the ‘dialogue’ we were attempting to instigate.