Perceptions of Dance, Games and Technology

Have you ever visited a dance show where children, teens and adults from different age groups, amateurs, perform, in a series of dances choreographed by their teachers and coaches? If not, you’ve missed a most amazing source of joy, inspiration, and a chance to see wonderful, excited children and teens, brave adults, everyone on the stage in front of your eyes, eager and ready to give their best to you, the audience.

When we, as the audience, put our minds to cherish, enjoy and understand the value of what the dancers are offering to us, they return our investment back multiplied. We can share into the worlds of the courageous and expressive minds and celebrate what we see and hear. Not infrequently, they surprise us and we learn something unexpected. The dancers have their wonderful motivations, skill and joy of dancing by which they can gain the rare permission to approach us, to come close.

Dance has the most international language, something we all understand and spontaneously enjoy, in our own ways. There is no right recipe for experiencing or interpreting a dance performance. It is something even the best neural-network, Google translator, is unable to decipher for us. It must be experienced either as dancer or as the motivated audience.  If indeed one day, Google would achieve such a marvelous performance, there would probably be only robots on the stage – and in the audience. But at the Pop Show in Helsinki, with the modern dance styles, just a few days ago, they were not robots, they were kids and teens and dancers from all age groups, with something to tell us, not forgetting the robot-like behavior either…

We attended the Dance team’s Pop Dance Show on 5th February at Kulttuuritalo (Culture House), in Helsinki, where the teenage daughter of close friends was dancing in one of the several teams, having three different dances to perform. When you go and see children dance, perhaps starting when they are only five, you will experience something that no professional dance group can ever offer to you: to see the skills and the power of artistic expression emerge and grow, often, every year, surprising you by what a devoted exercise and motivation makes possible, to see the personal change, the individual progress and joy and then, one day, to see an adult dancing, in a way that directly touches your own life, but closer than any professional show can ever do, because you have seen and lived near to the emergence of an artist.

The dance program at Kulttuuritalo had compelling themes, Games, Technology, Social Media and Society. I can only hope that some enthusiastic researchers from these fields could have been present in the audience. The show made it visible, almost emotionally tangible – the psychological and social aspects of modern technology in the real, lively life of children – and us.  The choreography and the performances in all four themes revealed something that no scientific study can accomplish.  The dancers made visible the new psychology of styles, feelings, connectedness and immersion in our familiar technologies. You can imagine a vision of a stage where a wide video screen full of colorful emojis serves as the immersive background for dancing kids, lively, smiling, running, playing children in their roles, some locked into their mobile phone uses and behaviors. You don’t have to be a psychology professor to be moved and to start thinking.

Having an extensive career in the study of human-technology interaction, even game psychology with my colleague Dr. Jari Takatalo, who has developed a novel theory on the psychology of gaming, it was an eye-opening to see the amazing expressive power of well-choreographed dances to these most acute and demanding human themes and how they can come alive on stage.  The dances and the dance teams provided us with lenses to the themes as the host of the evening Hery-Christian Henry introduced them to us.  They were very human lenses, indeed.

We could also see amazing skill and many styles on the stage, international in their essence, something you can meet all over the world. There could not be a better way for cultural interaction and sharing in such a natural way, or like their coach expressed it – they don’t even know how international they are.  The choreography, dance styles and their references to their origins, the dresses and make-ups – all these together painted an image of game worlds, life with technologies and social media as it lives in our minds and especially in the behavior and the minds of our children. Dancers made this tangible in way that can touch us better than any hard science, brain recordings and market tools can ever do.

Academic research often suffers itself from a kind of Heisenberg problem: the closer to the phenomena the researcher goes with his and her methods and tools of measurement, the higher the risk of losing the cultural, personal and spiritual richness of the phenomenon, the big picture of what a game or a technology is about. On the dance stage, the starting point has freedoms, it is connected with life, and it can be more holistic and open to creative, human ways of expressing the feelings, interpretations and the appearances of the main themes.

What is hidden in science can be strikingly visible in the arts. At the Pop Show I realized the immense potential such performances can have to help us understand and see more than meets the eye in these familiar topics in the modern and the future society with its dominating technologies. There was something special seeing children make that visible, instead of the imminent academics, technologists and professors at their stages of fame. Both are needed, especially if you ask me, but this was different.

I have no idea what the choreographers might have for us next time, but the theme of technology is not even close to be exhausted. I’d love to see their interpretation of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with love, care and joy, something the technologists and futurists always seem to forget!

In May 2017 the Danceteam International has its 10-year anniversary show for which they have been ambitious enough to reserve the magnificent Musiikkitalo in Helsinki, Helsinki Music Centre (https://www.musiikkitalo.fi/en/content/musiikkitalo-helsinki-music-centre) as the site of their celebration show. If you happen to be in Helsinki and are lucky enough to have the tickets you can join us, the well-prepared audience.

Site Footer