Quiet Pulse: The Dance of Solitude
3D ANIMATION | MOTION CAPTURE | LIVE DANCE PERFORMANCE
TECHNOLOGY: Motion Capture / Motion Builder / Maya / Houdini / Premiere
PERFORMER: Sarah Amores
Researchers have defined solitude in various ways throughout history, and its meaning continues to evolve. In today's fast-paced world, it's important to ask: How can we embrace solitude in our stressful, constraint-filled daily lives?
In solitude, our bodies may be confined to one space, but our minds are free to wander, experiencing a wide range of emotions. Dance, with its exaggerated movements, has a unique ability to convey these emotions and “speak” to people in ways that go beyond the everyday. I used a motion capture system to record the dancer’s movements, later adding visual effects to enhance the emotional expression.
This video documents a live dance performance that portrays a personal journey through solitude, combining motion capture, projection, modern dance, and a stage set. While the journey doesn’t represent one person's experience, it serves as a collective expression of solitude that resonates with many. I believe solitude is a multifaceted experience, and the performance is divided into four chapters—Escape, Dissociation, Choice, and Solitude—to reflect its different phases. Each chapter has its own choreography, music, and visual effects, with a sense of confinement carried throughout the performance via the physical stage set.
This piece isn’t meant to be a step-by-step guide to finding peace in solitude. Instead, I hope it encourages self-reflection and helps people uncover their own quiet pulse within solitude.
Ideation
I drew inspiration from two people close to me—my mom and my roommate. My parents work together, so my mom is rarely alone except when she’s in the bathroom. She takes long showers, does her skincare routine, and listens to podcasts during this time. Similarly, my roommate spends extended periods on the toilet, playing Candy Crush. Both of them describe this time in the bathroom as the most peaceful part of their day.
Their solitude is very limited by external conditions. My mom has work and family, and my roommate has to share a small apartment with me because the rent in NYC is too expensive. They cannot smoothly go to a place with no other people and cut off all the communication.
The motion of human bodies can express a lot of inner feelings, and how the performers interact with their surroundings(which can be a virtual world or physical space) can reflect inter-human or human-society relationships, which might be a good way to express my idea.
According to the four scenes I want to show in the performance, I created a storyboard as the guide of my mocap recording.
Staging
I decided to set an LED cube on the stage as the enclosed space for my dancer to perform. I was also thinking of building an audio-reactive LED system to add more interactions, but I’m not too sure about the final effect on the stage, so I began with building a small prototype first.
I went to Canal Plastic Center to buy some acyclic sticks and an LED shop to see the LED strips. I cut those acyclic sticks by even length and glued them up. To test the audio reactive function, I used a microphone sound detector as the signal input and hooked it up with an LED light.
As a result, I bought some neon light strips to see if they look better. For the cube, I bought some transparent PVC tubes and joints instead of acyclic because they are cheaper and easier to assemble.
After trying to adjust the dial to change its sensitivity, I still feel the light flashes too much and it’s not appropriate for the show. Meanwhile, I don’t like the point-light LED strips.
Sound
In order to help the dancer get a better sense of what I want at the recording, I found some loyal free songs online. I used a website called Epidemic Sound. It provides the service of searching by mood and movements which I found super useful.
Besides the music, I also want to add some sound effects like breathe and annoying ambient sound, so I found some on Freesound.
Recording
Before we started the formal recording. I played the soundtracks I chose and asked Sarah(my dancer) to free dance according to it. I see this part as a test for the accuracy of music as well as a chance to get some surprisingly good takes from the dancer’s perspective.
For the second part, I walked through my storyboard with Sarah and gave her instructions while she was dancing. For each scene, we took two or three takes as backup.
Render
I assigned the motion capture data to my rigged female model and baked the animation in MotionBuilder. Then imported the animation into Houdini to do the particle effects then rendered them out. Next, I imported everything into Premiere to do the editing.
Conclusion
Everyone’s solitary experience is different. Through the researching process, I found that some people enjoy solitude because they love the freedom, the quiet, or the efficiency solitude could bring to them, but most people’s solitary experiences start from unpleasant emotions. They see solitude as a way to temporarily escape from reality. Escaping is not the ultimate way to solve problems, but it does give people time to take a breathe and recover from pain. We should respect it. I know it’s hard, but we should try to take advantage of the opportunity urban solitude offers to turn a painful state of being into a positive one. Maybe we can’t change the outer condition a lot, but we could transform ourselves from the inside. Also, I want to mention that, sociability doesn’t conflict with solitude. A person would need social contacts as well as time to be alone.
Next Step
For this project, my participants and the amount of academic research I conducted were limited, so the final result might be inaccurate and subjective. A lot more study is still needed. After the performance, I run a feedback session and got a lot of valuable suggestions. The project would be greater if I had the chance to more iterations.
Also, I’d like to keep exploring the use of motion capture not only as recording data for games and animations but also as a format of performing art. In the future version of the project, I would like to do the motion capture part live and get the audience involved in the performance, which might enhance the experience.
With the future development of human technology and culture, the format of solitude may keep changing, so dreaming about that is also interesting.
