Unison and the Technology of Busby Berkeley's Dancing Girls | MVLab (Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Mike Junokas, Sarah Mininsohn, and Kayt MacMaster)
Unison and the Technology of Busby Berkeley's Dancing Girls
Our research studies the relationship between choreographic uniformity and individualism. Specifically, we are analyzing the cinematic choreography Busby Berkeley created in Hollywood in the early 1930s. Thanks to his background choreographing military parades during WWI and the vast industrial and personnel resources Hollywood afforded him, Berkeley was able to create increasingly polished, complex, and abstract choreographic patterns using small, repetitive movements performed by large corps of dancers and specific cinematic framings of the (predominantly female) dancers. Sometimes, however, an individual’s movements deviate from the ensemble, through intention or error, and every dancer’s performance differs slightly. By recreating the choreography using motion-capture technology developed in our movement visualization lab (http://mvlab.org/) we can compare and contrast humanistic and computerized unison. What can this research approach teach us about the value of (deliberate and unintentional) human error to artistic practices? And what pedagogical purpose does an analysis of Busby Berkeley’s choreography and an understanding of his working patterns serve in teaching unison phrases to dancers?
