Tuning to our Environment: Virtual Embodiment and the Seki Method
Students warming up before the Seki Method training workshop.
Experimenting with interactive body visualizations and avatars
Experimenting with interactive body visualizations and avatars
Experimenting with interactive body visualizations and avatars
Minako Seki was born in Nagasaki, in Japan. She started her dance career in Tokyo with the Company Dance Love Machine, under the artistic direction of Tetsuro Tamura and Anzu Furukawa. In 1987 she founded and co-directed the company “Tatoeba -Théâtre Danse Grotesque”, the first Butoh dance ensemble in Europe. The group explored the dormant potential of human beings. This has been a recurrent theme in Minako’s work and she has continued to investigate it in all her dance productions. Besides her artistic career, Minako Seki is devoted to teaching. She facilitates intensive dance workshops worldwide, through a holistic program.
Project Description
How does the assistance of virtual reality impact students’ ability to embody movement concepts? This project, Tuning to our Environment, is a collaboration Dr Tanya Calamoneri (Department of Dance) is undertaking with The Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD) to develop a creative visualization, interactive virtual embodiment and virtual reality tools rooted in butoh dance movements and imagery. She invited butoh artist Minako Seki, with whom she had studied for several years, to explore motion capture as a means of building virtual embodiments and environments with her movements and performance techniques. She joined us for 10 days in 2023 and will be returning for another 10 days in Summer 2024.
Long-term movement imagery project in VR project with Japanese artist Minako Seki and collaborators at ACCAD including staff researchers Vita Berezina-Blackburn and Jeremy Patterson, and Alex Oliszewski, Associate Professor, Theatre, Film, and Media Arts (TFMA) aims to produce interactive tools that can be incorporated into future composition, improvisation, or cross-disciplinary courses for Dance, TFMA, and ACCAD students and wider community. Our goal is to immerse performers and visual artists in a multi-sensory, image rich-landscape to enhance their movement expression.
More information can be found here: https://u.osu.edu/calamoneri-1/butoh-creative-visualization/
Project Leads
- Dr Tanya Calamoneri, Department of Dance
Project Team
- Vita Berezina-Blackburn, Senior Creative Technologist, ACCAD
- Jeremy Patterson, Senior Graphics Researcher, ACCAD
- Alex Oliszewski, Associate Professor, Theatre, Film and Media Arts, ACCAD
- Zoye November, ACCAD Motion Lab Graduate Research Associate, MFA candidate, Department of Dance
With contributions from the graduate students involved in Minako Seki residencies and workshops:
- Department of Dance: Kierra Williams, Isabel Bowser, Alisha Jihn, Benjamin Roach, Mary Storm, Jiara Sha, Yukina Sato, Ishmael Konney.
- Department of Theatre, Film and Media Arts: Angelina Steshenko, Patton Lewis, Francis Miller.
- Department of Design: William Yuan, ACCAD GRA, Department of Design, Emma Burns, ACCAD GRA, Department of Design
Supported through a grant from the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme 2023-24 Centers and Institutes Grants. ($10,000 to support visiting artist Minako Seki in January 2023 and July 2024, working with graduate and undergraduate students in Dance, ACCAD, and Theatre, Film & Media Arts, TFMA.)
Filters: Interactive Media, Interdisciplinary Collaborations, Motion Capture, Motion Lab, Virtual Environments, VR/AR
