International Dance and Technology 99 (IDAT99), at Arizona State University, AZ.
Feb. 25-28, 1999.

This paper describes motivations and techniques to extend the expressive grammar of dance and theatrical performances. We first give an outline of previous work in performance, which has inspired our research, and explain how our technology can contribute along historical directions of exploration. We then present real-time computer vision based body tracking and gesture recognition techniques which is used in conjunction with a Media Actors software architecture to choreograph digital media together with human performers. We show applications to dance and theater which augment the traditional performance stage with images, video, music, text, able to respond to movement and gesture in believable, esthetical, and expressive manners. Finally, we describe a scenario and work in progress, which allows us to apply our artistic and technological advances to street performance.

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