Funded by AHRC Digital Transformations, AH/M010279/1. PI: Erma Johnson-Jones; CI: Kirk Woolford (mentoring a junior colleague in her first AHRC-funded project).
Funding: £39,077; direct allocation £20,925.
Holding entry: images, video and full description to add.
Breakdown Harmonica was an AHRC Digital Transformations project (AH/M010279/1), led by Erma Johnson-Jones as principal investigator with Kirk Woolford as co-investigator. It ran from September 2015 to September 2016 at the University of Roehampton.
The project studied Jane Dudley’s 1938 solo Harmonica Breakdown. Dudley, a former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, directed contemporary dance at the London Contemporary Dance School from 1970. The dance is set to a harmonica blues by Sonny Terry and addresses the hardship of African American workers in the Dust Bowl years. Dudley called it “a dance of misery-and defiance rising out of it.” Sheron Wray, who worked closely with Dudley, inherited the piece and still stages it internationally.
A 1995 film of the dance existed, but the work had never been documented through movement notation or digital capture. The project set out to record it with several motion capture technologies, to examine how each approach differs, and to compare how they complement one another. The aim was a dynamic choreographic score combining motion capture data, Laban Movement Analysis scores and Wray’s oral and physical transmission of the dance. The score was meant to make the work legible both to dance scholars and practitioners and to researchers working on automated, qualitative analysis of human movement.
The project also tested how far digital capture could add to Laban Movement Analysis in helping learners embody movement. Dance was chosen over sport because it gives a result that is both instructive and enjoyable to watch, and the team expected the findings to be useful in movement-based fields from physiotherapy to tenpin bowling. Results were planned for the International Council for Kinetography Laban (ICKL) conference in 2017.
Source: UKRI Gateway to Research, grant AH/M010279/1. Kirk Woolford on Gateway to Research
