Speculative Moves Library
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| Contributor | Move title | Move description | Why this move? | What does the move mean to you? | Choreographed on Spot? | Changes made to translate the movement onto Spot | Collaborators | Movement inspiration | Residency video | Video archive of Spot performing the move |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jessica Rajko | Trio A Segment | I chose a small sequence from Yvonne Rainer's Trio A. This specific segment shows up in a satirical video of Yvonne Rainer teaching Martha Graham (played by Richard Move) Trio A. In this satirical video, viewers can see the discrepancy in movement quality, performative priorities, and aesthetics between Rainer and Graham (Move). | When thinking about this project, I was reflecting on how much of the dance knowledge capital brokered from within computing and engineering is transferred through postmodern practices and processes. In the case of Spot and Boston Dynamics, the particular brokering role that postmodern practices plays is evident, yet hidden from public view. Most of the dance movement gestures created for Spot in the Choreographer GUI highlight iconic movements from ballet and various forms of Black social dance. However, the dancers invited to choreograph and collaborate with Spot robots tend to come from postmodern lineages of dance training. I wanted to consider what it means to make this hidden connection to postmodern dance present within the archive itself. I also found the idea of using Trio A to do this compelling because Trio A is often used as a boundary object or "seminal dance work" when discussing, analyzing, and describing postmodern dance. The fact that there is this satirical video of Yvonne Rainer teaching Trio A to Martha Graham played by Richard Move is merely icing on the cake. | As a dancer who has also been trained in dance forms rooted in postmodern lineages, I feel both connected to this work and repelled by what it has done to retain white supremacist structures within dance and dance-based collaborations--albeit I would say, unintentionally. Intentions aside, the role postmodernism plays in cultivating racial exclusion is clear and has been discussed by many. I feel like nodding to this history helps amplify its role as well as its geocultural positioning. Postmodern dance is not neutral. The structures and processes of making dances that derive from postmodern dance are similarly not neutral. And yet, they are what I know to be effective in collaborative contexts. By placing Trio A into the archive, I am recognizing my own privilege and complicity in reinforcing the value of dance knowledge deriving from EuroAmerican concert dance practices. | Y | In the GUI, Spot cannot hold its leg off the ground for long periods of time, so the length of the moments in which Spot's legs are off teh floor are much faster. We could not bring both a front and back leg off the floor simultaneously, so we had to choose an order to these motions that are simultaneous in the video. This means we brought the front right leg to Gauger's head first, and then we extended the back left leg. The back leg had to return to the ground before dropping the body toward the floor as well. Because Gauger's arm better functions similar to a human arm for complex arm gestures, we switched Gauger's arm from representing the head to representing the arm once it stood back up. In the initial gesture when the hand turns left, we combined the hand and head gestures together, once the arm begins arcing, it only represents the movement of the arm in the Trio A movement. Lastly, we had to segment out the steps to 1/4 step around rather than pivot. These steps are inserted at two separate times to keep with the flow of the arm arc, which was prioritized. | Max Merlin | Original Trio A (1966, filmed 1978) ↗ Yvonne teaching Martha (Richard Move) ↗ | Residency video ↗ | Archive video 1 ↗ Archive video 2 ↗ |
| Elijah Lennington | Within Quiet Joy (Make it Robot) | The movement is from the beginning of a solo I choreographed my senior year of college. The piece examined the way gender lives in the body through movement, gesture, and energy. The movement explored is a reflection of my own perception of my identity and is intended to poke fun at and display the contradictions of masculinity and femininity in one body. | I thought it was fun (and would be funny) to take movement that was explicity and intentionally gendered, or tied to gender, and put it on something that does not actaully have a gender, or a way to indentify a gender outside of cultural assumption about what gender looks like. I wanted to explore if I could replicate movements that made the robot feel like a more feminine or masculinity entity. There are so many different ways to interpret movement that depend soley on someone personal experience that one person trying to encode them onto a robot with a very narrow ability to manipulate and replicate the nuances to how gender lives in the body felt absurd. This also questioned to usage of pronouns for the robot. While we alternated through different sets (mostly using it) if the robot was gendered it was using the pronoun 'he'. This is an interesting observation to me as we tend to gender machines we own or things that are used as service decives as feminine, while machines that we view as more independent or intelligent as masculine. | This chunk is personal in the way that it is ultimately a display on my own identity. It is part of a piece of personal expression that was choreographed by me. about me, on me, for me to perform. The deeply personal nature of the piece means that it is deeply connect to the way that I move and that my body dances. The piece initially had an interagative nature to it, as my own expression tends to call into question my own gender identity. The piece was ultimately about the joy of expression and the freedom of constraints, something that Spot does not have the ability to process itself, despite the human desire to think it does. | Y - partial | The swoop of the body and articulation of the spine that often occurred in the human body had to be changed to a more leg-connected movement in order for a similar motion to occur. Additionally, we had to change steps from three to two due to the nature of Spot having four legs and me only having two. | Jose Toribio, Ivy He, Varsha Iyengar | Full solo ↗ | Residency video ↗ | Archive video ↗ |
| Ivy He | The Soul of Peacock (Segment) | The peacock dance originated from the Dai Ethnic group's traditional dance in China. The dance mimics the movement of a peacock wandering around a forest, opening its features, etc. Peacock is a symbol of luck and auspiciousness in the Dai ethnic group. | The manipulator integrated with the Spot robot functions interchangeably as both an arm and its "head". During that choreography sessions, we observed the frequent switch between moves that uses the maniputor as head vs. as arm. I found beauty in the lack of clear boundary between the which representation is more natural to use in various scenarios. The abstraction and mapping from human to a non-human entity with different anatomy reminds me of Chinese folkloric dance where many are nature and animal inspired. | The Soul of Peacock was choreographed by Liping Yang, who is one of the most famous and recognized dancer in China. She is known for performance of Dai peacock dance and adapting her lifestyle to perfecting the performance. This piece came into mind specifically because of the ongoing discourse of embodiment. We have often view Spot as a robot dog, and peacock as a bird is bipedal but with a very long neck that resembles Spot's arm/neck. I am planning to explore the coding and decoding process of bodily movement in this chunk. | N | N/A | N/A | Yang Liping – The Soul of Peacock – Peacock Dance – Traditional Dance – HD 杨丽萍《雀之灵》完整版 高清 孔雀舞 傣族舞 | Residency video ↗ | N/A |
| Varsha Iyengar | A Wellness Journey | This segment is from my memory of Spot Check which is a feature on the tablet controller used to recalibrate a robot's joints and camera. | Couple of reasons. First, to hold onto a moment in the lab while watching Spot go through the calibration for the first time. It was described to feel similar to a yoga flow and different than the choreographic moments we had watched earlier. Second, an attempt to emphasize and make visible the different modes of operation in the robot. Specifically, playing with the range of motion and translating the affordances of mobility of Spot during Spot Check to the constraints in the Choreographer application. In a broader sense, to play with a whimsical visual of "the engineers of the application forgetting to import a function" in contrast to the more "serious" question of accessibility to pieces of software provided to perceived users of the software. | As a movement artist with current overuse injuries, I am hyper aware of new physical limitations and warm up routines appreciated by my own body. Adding to this, my past experience with industrial robots is that re-calibration was necessary to reduce faults occuring in repetitive movement over long periods of time. Tying this together, I chose the calibration sequence as a learning moment on ..day 2[?]... to understand hardware and construction of the Spot, joint mobility, and play with the limitations on the choreographer app. . | Y | Jose and I tried to setup a second Spot to start choreographing in the common space but discovered that Rooter died twice while we sent it messages to lift up both legs on the same side. We discovered that it is generally a hard motion for the Spots. Since we were trying to get the slowest and longest possible step Spot could take, we experiemented with extremes of the 6 axes on leg joints and waypoint dwell to form smooth trajectories. There was a conscious choice to only use the body for this choreo on Gouger - mostly cause calibration on Rooter showed Arm dyscfunctional issues. | Jose to my immediate left. Ivy next to him. Max to the left of Ivy, for quick checks and beautiful distractions while knighting Spot with foam swords. | N/A | Residency video ↗ | Archive video ↗ |
| Max Merlin | See the day (freestyle) | This segment is an adaptation of the video series Dances Moving, by Brian David Gilbert. This is the final piece of the series, in which Brian lets loose his feelings in a freestyled dance, incorporating elements from the previous pieces. It's also a song that I really like. | I've actually been meaning to attempt this dance on spot for a while, but never pulled the trigger on it. I this performance resonates very strongly with me, and it would be an extreme challenge to adapt to the robot given its reliance on human morphologies | I think that Brian David Gilbert's work in general has been an instigating influence for my own re-investment into performance music and improv. Also this is a calming song that gets stuck in my head and I listen to it over and over on repeat | N | N/A | N/A | Watch on YouTube ↗ | Residency video ↗ | N/A |
| Jose Toribio | The Reject | This segment is an adaption of a urban dance called "the reject: The reject is a move that looks like the backwards running man. It was famous in the late 2000s in Los Angeles, California then across the United States. It’s a dance that was… | This dance was a popular dance for me in elementary and middle school and was the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a segment to do | This segment means alot to me because it was the dance i rehearsed as a kid and kept attempting until i was confident enough to do it around people.The dance was really popular in my inner city public school so it was really important to get the moves correct. | N | N/A | N/A | Watch on YouTube ↗ | Residency video ↗ | N/A |
| Lawrence Fung | Imitation of "Doing The Spot Thing" | This chunk is inspired by the animation description in one of spot's movement vocabulary the "bouree." Consequently, this chunk imitates the movement of the robot "dog." | It was interesting to observe spot behave and movement in a 4 legged manner. Because it is a robot, the space in between movements are quite abrupt and jarring. There are certain spot movements like the bouree where it mimics artistic human movement and I wanted to instead mimic a robotic movement in a human manner | It means a reversal of roles and an exploration of moving in very non- sequential ways. Mimicary in non-biological form. | N | N/A | N/A | N/A | Residency video ↗ | N/A |
| Max Merlin | Never gonna spot dance again | This is an adaptation of a dance from the Dance fitness class I took at Brown done to the song "Never gonna not dance again" by P!nk. The full version was performed at an Innovation Showcase in Providence RI | I had wanted to make a performance that was my own for a while, but I was intimidated by a lack of choreographic experience. Much of what I had done before was juts adapt other peoples visions onto the spot. This was a dance I enjoyed a lot and a song that got stuck in my head, so it helped for me to have a starting point for my choreography. first I just tried to adapt it as close as possible, then by the second verse I was able to start playing with the ways spot could make it different. | I'm very proud of my final performance. I feel like I stretched the limits of both spot and myself. It feels like this was the piece that gave me more confidence to enter the performance space, instead of juts being an assistant to someone else | Y | I had a lot of trouble getting turns and big sweeping steps. I had to change the step-foot drag in the chorus and alternated at times between using the arm to indicate a head or a hand. | No one. | N/A | Residency video ↗ | Archive video ↗ |