Arushi Singh—Outlier 2021 Lightning Talk—A dancer's trace

A dancer's trace The goal of this project was to translate the intricate movements in the Indian classical dance of Kathak into abstract and expressive visualizations using non-traditional methods of capturing movement. Indian classical dance performances have traditionally been used to communicate spiritual ideas, stories, and values dating as far back as 300BCE. These performances are a combination of facial expressions, intricate and well-structured movements, compelling narratives as well as accompanying musicals to form a unique experience for the audience. Kathak, originating from Northern India, is characterized by its rhythmic footwork in tandem with graceful upper body movements. It traditionally is a solo dance performance where the dancer wears bells around their ankles while they dance accompanied by traditional music. Even though the audiences in a live Kathak performance experience the composition, the complex physical movements of feet and arms are often intermingled and difficult to isolate. Dancers have thus relied on fragmented notational renderings as a means to preserve these subtle bodily movements. Nevertheless, Kathak dancers leave traces of their performances in the environment after they leave. Capturing these traces encourages dance enthusiasts and curious audiences to take a more intimate look at the complex movements in Indian classical dance performances, especially Kathak. Broadly, my approach to this work is a visualization design exploration where I carry out multiple visualization experiments. This could be a valuable technique allowing information designers to not only challenge the existing knowledge of a phenomena (i.e. dance performance in this case) but also experience the phenomena by generating data in real time. I conducted these explorations using three inexpensive methods – tracing paint on paper, long exposure photography, and triaxial motion sensors to capture movement in Kathak dance. In this work, I present the visualization properties of the data generated as a result of these explorations. I hope this work provokes discussions among the information design community on experiencing the phenomena encapsulated within the dance performances and enables the audience to gain a more intimate appreciation for the performer’s skills.