We present a retrospective autoethnography grounded in data-driven design. The first author collected her movement data and subjective experience of learning the dance repertoire of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, which together were encoded into the design of a set of plaster artefacts physicalising her embodied dance learning progression. The artefacts reflect the first author’s bodily transformation, mirroring her transition from discomfort to ease, and changes in her expressive capabilities. Our method offers an alternative to documentation of embodied learning through design. Throughout our design process we leverage on the movement data, the field notes and the first author’s memory of her journey, all of which constitute entangled and complementary input into her experience of dance learning. We show that the data physicalisations provided a gateway into the intangible experience and allowed for a deep and reflexive understanding of our dataset.

We present how we co-designed with a connoisseur a system that visualizes a star-like ribbon joining at the solar plexus and animated it from motion capture data to perform Isadora Duncan’s dances. Additionally, the system visualizes the trace of the solar plexus and specific keyframes of the choreography as key poses placed in the 3D space. We display the visualization in a Hololens headset and provide features that allow to manipulate it in order to understand and learn Duncan’s qualities and choreographic style. Through a workshop with dancers, we ran a structured observation where we compared qualitatively how the dancers were able to perceive Duncan’s qualities and embody them using the system set according to two different conditions: displaying all the future keyframes or displaying a limited number of keyframes. We discuss the results of our workshop and the use of augmented reality in the studio for pedagogical purposes.

We present a long-term collaboration between dancers and designers, centred around the transmission of the century-old repertoire of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. We engaged in a co-design process with a Duncanian dancer consisting of conversations and participation in her transmission of Duncan’s choreographies and technique. We then articulated experiential qualities central to Duncan’s repertoire and used them to guide the design of the probes, the sounding scarfs. Our probes sonify dancers’ movements using temporal sensors embedded in the fabric of the scarfs, with the goal of evoking Duncan’s work and legacy. We shared the probes with our Duncan dance community and found that they deepen the dancers’ engagement with the repertoire. Finally, we discuss how co-designing with slowness and humility were key to the dialogue created between the practitioners, allowing for seamless integration of design research and dance practice.

We present a new abstract representation of choreographic motion that conveys the movement quality of fluidity that is central to the style of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. We designed our model through a collaboration with an expert Duncanian dancer, using five flexible ribbons joining at the solar plexus and animated it from motion capture data using a tailored optimization-based algorithm. We display our model in a Hololens headset and provide features that allow to visualize and manipulate it in order to understand and learn Duncan’s choreographic style. Through a series of workshops, we explored our system with professional dancers and were able to observe how it provides them with an immersive experience of a novel visualization of Duncan movement qualities in a way that was not possible with traditional human-like or skeleton-based representations.