Echoes of Harmonic Threads is an interdisciplinary arts-based research and performance project that investigates the confluence of animated cloth, sonic identity (LaBelle, 2018), and Afrofuturism in an immersive co-created environment. Set against a projected virtual backdrop that mirrors and responds to a live dancer’s movements, this investigation explores engagement with human kinesthetics, the live body in motion, and themes of bondage, freedom, and speculative futures/pasts through a lens of poetry and musical motif rooted in the heritage and posterity of Black culture and the African diaspora.
In this setting, the audience is presented with physical fragments of cloth with which they can interact through touch. Limited to a small number of participants at a time, their manipulations of these tangible threads influence the dancer’s virtual canvas, creating a symbiotic, real-time dialogue. The audience’s involvement with the physical cloth directly manipulates the properties of the virtual.
The virtual cloth’s visual and temporal properties, such as gravity, weight, texture, and its sonic attributes, pitch, amplitude, and timbre, evolve throughout the performance, reflecting the dancer’s embodied experience and the audience’s participatory interactions within the structure of Afrofuturist narrative themes, simultaneously addressing the human ritual of wrapping our bodies in cloth (Schneider, 1987).
Drawing from the rich tapestry of Afrofuturism, the project delves into sonic performativity, animated materiality, and the deep connections between the human body, technology, and imagination. The dancer’s costume, illuminated by the projected animations, serves as an extension and augmentation of their body, a reflection of their narrative identity (Brandstetter, 2015), and a bridge between the physical and the virtual worlds. With every ripple of the virtual cloth, a dialogue unfolds—echoing an improvisational symphony pulsating unpredictably.
Through this exploration, the project aims to blur the once-concrete boundaries between flesh, costume, and digital matter, ushering us into an extraordinary tableau of human-digital coexistence. The practical implementation of the project emphasizes the dynamic interplay between the dancer, the virtual cloth, and audience participation in improvisational feedback with sound. This improvisation and generative structure are based on historical reflections of Black culture echoed in the forms of jazz music, blues music, poetry, and Afrofuturist literature (Hamilton, 2017).
Echoes of Harmonic Threads contextualizes existing research in movement, body, sound, and space while exploring the importance of costume and cloth in dance and music performance, and the performativity of sound and identity. This project seeks to explore and celebrate Black cultural heritage while challenging traditional approaches to the medium and pushing the boundaries of Afrofuturism.
References:
- Brandstetter, G. (2015). Dance costume and movement space: Spatial formulas and their metamorphoses into fabric. In Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes (pp. 131-148). Oxford Studies in Dance Theory. New York: Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199916559.003.0008
- Hamilton, E. C. (2017). Afrofuturism and the Technologies of Survival. African Arts, 50(4), 18–23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48547433
- LaBelle, B. (2018). Sonic agency: Sound and emergent forms of resistance. Goldsmiths, University London.
Schneider, J. (1987). The Anthropology of Cloth. Annual Review of Anthropology, 16, 409–448. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155878