From Imagination to Preservation of Movement: Digital Tools for Contemporary Dance

Enrico Pitozzi’s chapter adopts a perspective that brings together dance studies, neuroscience, and the aesthetics of technology to interrogate how movement documentation is approached in choreography. His analysis focuses on the creative process to examine how technological tools facilitate the visualisation of movement from the enactment of an emerging “motor scheme” to its execution as a visible gesture. The “digital preservation” of movement is a means of remembering, reactivating, and transmitting traces of complex perceptual processes. Rather than simply recovering past movements, it enables performers to become aware of what has been performed and to imagine future possibilities, creating a previously unseen imaginary for movement, and new forms of archiving and memorising. Memory, in this context, is understood as a process that continually regenerates action and gesture and serves as a basis for new creative projects. Starting from a detailed observation of various “visualisation” methods, Pitozzi demonstrates an unprecedented technologically driven methodology that supports the documentation of the creative processes as well as research-creation, teaching, and learning in the performing arts and choreography. In sum, these digital tools not only preserve the creative process but also provide alternative perspectives—external biofeedback—that enhance the imagination of dancers and choreographers, allowing for the creation of innovative compositional scores.