Social eMotions Stoassa 24. ja 25. helmikuuta!

Kaksivuotinen tutkimusmatkamme sosiaalisten tunteiden maailmaan on tulossa päätökseen. Projektin huipentumaksi luotu tanssiteos esitettiin viime syksynä Oulussa, ja tällä viikolla se esitetään kaksi kertaa Helsingissä, kulttuurikeskus Stoassa.

Tämä on ensimmäinen kerta, kun esitämme teoksen kunnon teatteritilassa–Oulun esityksemmehän oli Rotuaarilla ulkoilmanäyttämöllä. Stoan black box antaa nyt teokselle kunnolliset puitteet: Jarkon ja Johannan tanssi saa näyttämöllä selkeät kehykset, Ullan ja Iidan musiikki soi tilassa ja ympäröi katsojat, ja iltapäivän aurinko ei tällä kertaa pese Roberton projisointeja näkymättömiin.

Teos on siis duetto kahdelle tanssijalle, kahdelle sellistille ja yhdelle tutkijalle. Teoksessa yleisö pääsee äänestämään koreografian ja musiikin tunteellisen sisällön mobiilisovelluksen kautta. Näin yleisö voi halutessaan asettautua tunnetutkijan rooliin ja nähdä, miten tunteita ilmaistaan ja miten ne tarttuvat ja muuttuvat. Esityksen jälkeisessä yleisökeskustelussa voimme keskustella taiteellista ja tieteellistä otetta yhdistäneestä tutkimuksestamme enemmänkin.

Social eMotions -tanssiteoksen esitykset siis pe 24.2. ja la 25.2. klo 19:00 Kulttuurikeskus Stoassa. Kahden teoksen illassa nähdään myös Johanna Nuutisen hieno sooloteos Hatched.

Esityksiin saa lippuja ovelta sekä Lippupisteestä.

Arts-based research II – reflections

Yesterday I posted my initial thoughts on arts-based research, the topic of today’s panel discussion. Here are my brief mental notes from the morning’s event–they are a mixed bag since I wasn’t taking notes.

Arts-based research

There’s a great initiative in Aalto University, called UWAS, or University-Wide Arts Studies. The aim of UWAS is to “offer access to arts-based thinking” to all students at Aalto. UWAS is organising a two-day seminar called U-Create, and I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on “arts-based research”. The panel takes place at 10:45–12:00 on Wednesday 2nd November, and you can watch the livestream or the recording here.

We were sent some initial questions for the panel (which , when I’m writing this, is tomorrow). So, spoiler alert, here’s what I’ll answer!

Social eMotions goes Tanzmesse

Last week the Social eMotions project and especially the dance piece was promoted at Tanzmesse 2016, the largest dance trade show in Europe. 

Social eMotions – the performance

Our Social eMotions project combines science and art, also in that the outcomes are both scientific and artistic. The science part is taking shape, we are writing up a paper on the kinematic analysis, as well as the perceptual experiments. At the same time, the artistic oven has been red hot, as the dance performance has been taking shape.

Our amazing dancers and musicians worked very hard during the first weeks of June to put together this ambitious and novel performance. There is choreographed movement and composed musical material, but the performance is improvised in the sense that the emotional dynamics and emotional contagion will change and mutate the materials. There is a very interesting set of interactions going on, as both dancers influence each other, as do both cellists, and of course the dancers are influenced by the music, and vice versa.

To keep things even more open, the audience will get to vote for the emotions that the performers work on. The audience gets this chance a few times during the performance, and as the full cycle will be performed twice, they can make different choices and thus experiment on emotional processes, using live dancers and musicians!

We already trialled this in an open rehearsal during the Helsinki Day, as a part of “Planet Suvilahti“. As the pic shows, there were a lot of people attending, and we got really nice feedback! Communicating the results of the online vote to performers was done in an old-fashioned way by showing the emotions on pieces of paper. By the actual performance, we’ll figure out a smoother way of doing it, hopefully integrating them to the interactive projections.

There is now also a trailer of the performance, it can be viewed below. The next public showcase of the work will be presented in Duesseldorf during the Tanzmesse on 2nd September, and the premiere will take place in Oulu on the final day of the OuDance Festival (Sunday 18th September). That performance will (weather permitting) be outdoors on the Rotuaari promenade. See you there?

Social eMotions trailer from Jarkko Lehmus on Vimeo.

 

 

Social eMotions update

It’s been a busy beginning of the year in the Social eMotions research project. We’ve been working on a number of things, so I thought it would be nice to have an update on where we are, including introductions of new members in our project team!

On the scientific side, the main theme has been perceptual experiments. We’ve been running experiments showing people animated clips such as the GIF above, and asking them to rate the dancers movements and their relationship along various scales. We are currently analysing data, and have just started to write up our movement analysis paper, so there’ll be published results soon.

On the artistic side, we are working full steam toward the première in Oulu in September. Jarkko and Johanna have been working on the movement material, and we now have also a composer and two musicians working on the music for the show! Jussi Lampela will compose music for the piece, and it will be performed live by two cellists, Iida-Vilhelmiina Laine and Ulla Lampela. We are very excited to have these stars join our team!

As the final performance starts to take shape, its key aspects are being planned and put to their places one by one. We are working on ways to let the audience influence the performance as it happens, and on ways to include the scientific results in it. For the latter purpose, we are getting help from Dr Roberto Pugliese in visualisations and projections. We visited Roberto’s studio yesterday and Jarkko took this snapshot of us dancing and Roberto’s system capturing it on Kinect and producing a live visualisation on screen.

This will (continue to) be great!

Movement data – what to do with it?

 

Now that we have recorded the approximately 450MB of movement data, it’s time to start processing and analysing it, and getting it ready for the next stages of the project. This, and probably the next couple of posts are about movement data: in this post I’ll explain briefly how optical motion capture works, and in the next ones what we can do with the data.  

Social eMotions: movement recordings completed!

Click the image for a video clip!

What a day! Yesterday we completed an important phase in the project: we have now recorded the movement data we are going to use in the next phases. This phase posed challenges for everyone in the project, as the artistic team, Jarkko and Johanna, had to create a choreography that could then be performed in different emotional scenarios, and then perfect those different scenarios to make them into convincing short stories, where the dynamic, social emotional processes are conveyed through body movements alone. The scientific team (me, Klaus and Maija) were racking our brains trying to figure out which combinations of emotions we should include (and crucially, which ones we could exclude), trying to make sure we have enough and correct data for the following phases (kinematic analysis, movement synthesis, and perceptual experiments). 

Social eMotions – sosiaaliset tunteet

Jarkko and Johanna – our dancers/choreographers are also very excited for the project!

Excitement! A new project! We recently got funding for a cool project that combines art and science, and have now started to work on it. We plan to document the two-year process in various ways, including posts in this blog. Our project, ‘Social eMotions’ combines movement research, psychology and contemporary dance. We are funded by the Kone Foundation, which is very exciting for us, as these grants are highly sought after and we are proud to be among the recipients, alongside the crème de la crème of Finnish arts and humanities! According to their definition, they fund “bold initiatives” in research and in the arts. We have five people in the team. The science crew consists of me, Klaus Förger and Maija Niinisalo, and we have worked together on previous behavioural synchrony projects. Our choreographer/dancers are Jarkko Lehmus and Johanna Nuutinen.