Supporting Perception of Spatiality in Dance in Augmented Reality

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In this paper we present how we co-designed with a connoisseur a system that visualizes a star-like ribbon joining at the solar plexus and animated it from motion capture data to perform the dances of Isadora Duncan. Additionally, the system visualizes the trace of the solar plexus as well as specific keyframes of the choreography as key poses placed in the 3D space. We display the visualization in a Hololens headset and provide features that allow to manipulate it in order to understand and learn Duncan's qualities and choreographic style. Through a workshop with dancers, we run a structured observation where we compared qualitatively how the dancers were able to perceive Duncan’s qualities and embody them using the system set according to two different conditions: 1) displaying all the future keyframes or 2) displaying a limited number of keyframes. We discuss the results of our workshop and more generally the use of augmented reality in the studio for pedagogical purposes.