Ghostcatching

Choreographed and performed by Bill T. Jones

Digital artistry by Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser

Producing director: Bob Bursey

Upon its premiere in 1999, Ghostcatching was described as having made complementary what had before been diametric: the combination of technology and humanity. The 7-minute work was created using pioneering motion-capture techniques, and Mr. Jones was filmed in a seamless succession of roughly forty different choreographic sequences. In their final rendered form, the bodies for Ghostcatching fall between a scribble and an x-ray, with line and density providing visual suggestion of rhythm and character, while the numerous facets of Mr. Jones's distinct artistic personality shine through.

Over the past 25 years, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company has shaped the evolution of contemporary dance through the creation and performance of over 140 works. Founded as a multicultural dance company in 1982, the Company was born of an 11-year artistic collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. Today, the Harlem based Company is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the modern dance world. The Company has performed its ever-enlarging repertoire worldwide in over 200 cities in 30 countries including: Austria, Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, South Africa, and the UK. Audiences of 50,000-100,000 people see the Company annually across the country and around the world.

Bill T. Jones, the Company's Artistic Director, Co-Founder, Choreographer and Dancer, is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates. In 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones "an irreplaceable dance treasure." He has studied classical ballet and modern dance, performed worldwide, created more than 100 works for his own company, and choreographed for other prestigious dance troupes and various projects. Ghostcatching is one of two collaborations with Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar and Mark Downie that expresses Mr. Jones's interest in new media and digital technology. For more information: www.billtjones.org

Paul Kaiser is a digital artist, writer, and teacher. In the 1980s Kaiser spent ten years teaching students with severe learning disabilities, with whom he collaborated on making multimedia depictions of their own minds. From this work, he derived two key ideas—mental space and drawing as performance— which became the points of departure for the digital artworks he has been making since the mid-90s.

In addition to extensive collaborations with his two OpenEnded Group colleagues Shelley Eshkar and Marc Downie, he's worked with Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and Trisha Brown. These works span a wide range of forms and disciplines, including dance, music, installation, film, and public art. In 2008, Kaiser received the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; in 1995, a Guggenheim Fellowship; and in 1992 a ComputerWorld/Smithsonian Award. He has taught at Wesleyan, Harvard, Columbia, and San Francisco State.

Shelley Eshkar is a digital artist whose research explores drawing, computer graphics, and human motion. He received his B.F.A. from the Cooper Union in 1993. One of his primary tools is motion capture, a technology that digitally captures the movement, but not the physical likeness, of human motion. Eshkar creates new digital bodies and spaces to host these motions. The motions are radically recomposed and altered, creating a work of performance that could exist only in virtual form.

Searching for books, movies, and music related to Ghostcatching? Our Amazon Wishlist includes even more resources, some with reviews, images, and a "look inside." Be sure to scroll all the way through the list—some gems are hiding at the very end!

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Curiosity Questions

Technology & dance
How have contemporary choreographers used technology?

Digital art
What have been the major developments in this emerging discipline?

Modern and postmodern dance
How does Bill T. Jones’s choreography draw on these traditions?

“Ghosts”
What are ghosts, literally or metaphorically: dimensions of identity, “mental space,” disembodiment, memory, after-images, tracings, capturing or documenting ephemeral art?

African American narratives and folksongs
What stories do they tell?

Family stories and personal histories
What kinds of personal narratives are well suited to retelling through dance or other art forms?

African American concert dance
How does Bill T. Jones’s work contribute to this larger body of work?

Choreographic process and improvisation
What was Bill T. Jones’s choreographic process for Ghostcatching? How does he use improvisation?

Visual elements
How does Ghostcatching explore these: point, volume, line, gesture, space, weight, mass, plane, and shape?

Project development and artistic collaboration
What was the collaborative process between choreographer/dancer and digital designers?

Bill T. Jones
What is his biography and past professional experience?

Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar, and the Riverbed Company
How was the company developed? What past professional experiences did these artists bring to the project?

A Phantasmic Performance Drawn from Captured Motion

By Robert Rindler

Almost two years ago, Lawrence Mirsky, Director of the Herb Lubalin Study Center for Design and Typography at The Cooper Union School of Art, came to see me with a proposal for a guest curatorial fellowship program. We immediately involved Margaret Morton, Professor of Graphic Design at the School, in our dialogue. We were interested in continuing and expanding the Lubalin Center's rich history of presenting exhibitions and publishing definitive writing on a broad range of issues related to the history and practice of design. We proposed to offer the resources of the Lubalin Center, its gallery, and members of our community—students, faculty, and professional staff—as partners in collaborative projects.

An online call for proposals was issued during Spring 1997 and, after reviewing many remarkable projects, we invited Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar (Art '93) of Riverbed to work with us on a project they initially titled Motion Alphabets. Paul and Shelley had begun an artistic partnership with dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones to produce a performance derived from digitized captured motion, to be premiered as an original virtual dance. We commissioned them to work with us on developing the piece and to collaborate with faculty, students, and staff on realizing an installation celebrating the work at Cooper Union.

The Cooper Union has a public mission that embraces and promotes intellectual discourse on a variety of issues important to our community of artists, designers and engineers. Peter Cooper's vision for our institution included an exploration of the convergences between science and art. Today, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, the Albert Nerken School of Engineering, and the School of Art, together with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, fulfill that mission daily in the classroom, laboratory, workshop, and studio for our matriculating students. Through our public programs we also strive to engage our colleagues in a forum ... through performance events, lectures, panel discussions, dialogues, and exhibitions.

It seemed to us that performance, which is not a discipline area of study in the School of Art, might be an excellent vehicle for expanding our thinking about point, line, plane, volume, weight, mass, space, and gesture. These elements are central to the study and production of art and architecture. We were intrigued by the prospect of bringing an artist whose entire body of work is about form, space, and movement to campus to work with us.

An early conception of the project among Jones, Eshkar, and Kaiser included ideas about body placement and movement as alphabet: the grammar with which kinetic poetry is written. When choreographed in specifically notated or improvised sequences, these visual "words" make up sentences that communicate ideas. The movement’s design, and the plan for how it repeats or evolves, tell the story. The narrative content of this formal language defines the piece. Would it be possible to design a series of movement phrases culminating in a new form that, although stolen or caught from the real body, now inhabit the ghost of that being? The resulting figure would be a new performer, cloned or drawn from captured movement, but scripted or choreographed digitally.

Bill T. Jones came to Cooper Union and danced in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery. He recited, sang, and chanted as he moved. He developed new characters and spawned new selves. A fabricated man, a baby, a dog, a sculptor, an athlete, a pedestrian, a makeshift woman, even mud and high frequency were descriptive names given to these identities. Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar captured these movements and began to work with Bill on engineering a disembodied spectral performance.

Listening to Bill T. Jones speak about dance is more like listening to a visual artist than a performing artist. Many of us, for the first time, began to understand the interrelationships between movement across the floor and movement across the page. Further, new notions of time-based, four-dimensional action emerged and we began to grasp the architecture inherent in the illusory forms and spaces drawn by the body.

It was about this time that we decided to engage Bill T. Jones with Cooper Union in yet another way. Architect and Trustee Charles Gwathmey has funded an endowed chair in art and architecture at the College. The chair is named for his father, Robert Gwathmey, who taught drawing here for many years. A conversation with Charles soon revealed his support for naming Bill T. Jones the Robert Gwathmey Chair for 1998-1999. We realized that Bill had much to teach us about drawing. He often speaks about dance as a visual art, and he tells a wonderful story of his belief that primitive man choreographed the hunt, danced when successful, then crawled into the cave to record the ritual on the walls. It is a profound and compelling account of our prehistoric, yet enduring, need to move and make a mark. Ghostcatching asks: Can a record of movement be more than a memory?

Throughout Bill T. Jones' remarkable career as both a dancer and choreographer with his life partner Arnie Zane, who has since passed away, he has often collaborated with visual, literary, and other performing artists to realize a new work. Donald Baechler, Gretchen Bender, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Bill Katz, Robert Longo, Isaac Mizrahi, Toni Morrison, Louise Nevelson, Liz Prince, Max Roach, Willi Smith, and Nari Ward are but a few of the artists with whom he has worked. His interest in texture, rhythm, color, and gestural nuance has propelled him into uncharted territory. His work is often controversial and always brilliant and innovative.

Paul Kaiser is the first interactive artist to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996) to develop new work. His collaborators have ranged from severely learning-disabled children (for which work he was awarded the Computerworld/Smithsonian Award in 1990) to theater artist Robert Wilson and the Keith Haring Foundation. Kaiser founded Riverbed, a small multimedia studio in New York City, and credits Robert Breer, Professor of Film at the Cooper Union School of Air, as one of his most important mentors.

Shelley Eshkar is a 1993 graduate of The School of Art at Cooper Union. His partnership with Kaiser at Riverbed and their previous work with Merce Cunningham have enabled him to bring his natural ability to render gesture to the core of this project. The collaboration between the dancer, digital artist, and Shelley's expressive marks have yielded a virtually engineered dance that is both extraordinary and unprecedented.

We are pleased and proud to be able to bring the work of these visionary artists to Cooper Union. It is through the coming together of individual artists who collaboratively explore new forms of visual expression that new art is made. The result of this collaboration, Ghostcatching, is an installation/exhibition/performance at the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery that can be experienced in the early days of 1999.

This catalog includes essays by Paul Kaiser and RoseLee Goldberg—the foremost historian of performance today—and is being published in celebration of the project. We have included some information about the history of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company; technology and dance; the use of photography, film, and video in conjunction with improvisation; drawing as performance; and dance as language. The story of the development of the Ghostcatching project collaboration between Jones, Eshkar, and Kaiser is illuminated as an outgrowth of Keith Haring's paintings on Jones' body and its subsequent sequential poses. Interviews with William Forsythe, Director of the Frankfurt Ballet, animator and filmmaker Robert Breer, and pioneering software developers Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut will also be excerpted. Illustrations include work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, Robert Wilson, Oskar Schlemmer, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Merce Cunningham. The last section of the book is a portfolio of still images from the animated performances in Ghostcatching.

Bill, Paul, and Shelly have been working with School of Art students Petter Ringbom and Frankie Rodriguez on developing a website for Ghostcatching. The website was created as a project in Professor Margaret Morton's Special Projects class at Cooper Union. The site takes advantage of cutting-edge web technology such as Dynamic HTML, Shockwave, and Flash animation and graphics. We will hold a dialogue with the artists and writers in February in Cooper Union's Great Hall, and Bill has generously agreed to hold several intimate seminars with Cooper art, architecture and engineering students to discuss intersections between the disciplines of movement and technology.

Origin of the Cornbread Song

Excerpt from Jones, Bill T. with Peggy Gillespie. Last Night on Earth. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. pp. 9–12. Copyright © Bill T. Jones.

If my father’s stories were evening entertainment, my mother's and Big Mama's stories had their roots in slavery and sharecropping and were full of the weight and obligations that black women carry.

Big Mama's mother had been a healing woman, born a slave or born to slaves sometime in the 1860s. My mother recalls her grandma Matt Lee's skirts sweeping the ground as she—then a little girl known as "Priss"—scurried in front collecting cigarette and cigar butts off the ground that Matt Lee would crumble and smoke in her pipe. And Estella remembers the time the overseer took her mother, Big Mama, out to the barn, made her lean over a bale of hay and had my mother, her two sisters, and her brother, Uncle Cap'n, kneel down and watch as he whipped her with a huge leather strap for leaving the field to tend to her daughter's difficult labor. Uncle Cap'n, then eight years old, stood up to stop the man from hitting his mother. The blow broke his hand and he lived the rest of his days with a twisted finger.

There were many conflicting stories told about my mother's father, Tom Walden, and why he had disappeared. According to one, two white girls had said they'd seen him peeking through their bedroom window one night and he'd had to run before the mob caught up with him. But once, after a fight, my father told us kids that Estella's father and Big Mama used to fight all the time and he had just run off. "Estella came by her fussing nature naturally. Her mama drove her own husband away," he said. Then, in a more conspiratorial tone, he added, "I never told your mama this, but a friend of mine claims he saw her daddy, Tom Walden, goin' to the swamp with a Clorox bottle. He probably thought it was moonshine and was too drunk to tell the difference. Nobody ever saw that man again."

My mother used to say, "If I'd had my daddy, I would read better than I do now. White people ran my daddy away."

One of Big Mama’s story-songs was, "Mama killed me, Daddy ate me, who's gonna hang me on the Christmas tree?":

There was a woman married to a angry man. They were raggedy poor. The woman was real scared of this man. When he left for work one morning, the angry man said to his wife, "When I come back, you better have somethin' for me to eat or I'm gonna beat you." When he came home, there was no food, so he beat his wife. This went on for many days. The poor woman was so scared she didn't know what to do. All day long she was alone in the house with her baby. All she could do was wring her hands, look up at the ceiling, and pray for the Lord to give her an answer.

Baby didn't eat all day. Baby began to cry, "Mama, I need somethin' to eat." And you know there is nothing so pitiful in the world as to hear your child hungry when you can't feed it. The little thing was crying out louder and louder, "Mama, I'm hungry."

Poor woman was about to start screaming and pulling her hair out. The little child was holding on to her, crying, "Mama, Mama, give me somethin' to eat.”

All of a sudden the woman saw the big old steamer trunk in the corner and got real calm. She went over, opened it, and said, "Honey, come over here, you want somethin' to eat?"

The little thing started walking across the room and stopped. Mama seemed so strange, so quiet. She said, "Come on, sweetheart, come over here to Mama."

The little thing said, "What? What you want, Mama?"

Mama said, "I want you to look here in the trunk. I have some corn bread in there for you."

The little thing ran over to the trunk, looked in. "Where? Where, Mama?"

Mama stood there with one hand on the lid. "Stretch, honey. You got to look way in there."

Little thing was so hungry, it was up on its toes with its bare neck stretched way over in that trunk. Little thing said, "Mama, I don't see nothin' ."

"You got to stretch a little bit more, baby. Just a little bit more."

And then, WHAM!!!! We would all jump because Big Mama had stomped on the floor or slapped the top of the table before continuing the story.

She slammed that trunk and cut off that child's head. She stripped the baby, skinned it, cooked it up real nice, just like you would a possum or a coon. She put gravy on it. That night when her husband came home, she served him a big plate of it. She saw him laughing for the first time in a long while. "Mmmm...," he said. "This is good." He ate a big bellyful and said, "Where's Baby?"

"Never you mind," she said. "I sent it over to Mama."

They went to bed, he pulled her real close. Later that night when they were fast asleep, the house filled up with light. The husband shot straight up in bed. He heard a voice. He jumped out of the bed. The voice was coming out of the steamer trunk. A child's voice. It was crying and singing.

At this point Big Mama would pause, pull closer to us, and in a childlike voice sing, "Mama killed me, Daddy ate me, who's gonna hang me on the Christmas Tree?"

We understood men beating women. We understood what it was like to only have corn bread in the house until Mama provided something else. We'd seen wildness in our mother in moments when the responsibilities of motherhood were almost more than she could bear. This story-song tapped the whole reservoir of doubts and concerns we had about the contract between parents and children.

But it also reassured us. We knew Gus had been a hobo in his youth. We knew that there had been a time when one of my older brothers had thrown his arms around my father's leg and been dragged down the street trying to keep him from leaving us. Sometimes we felt that this time with my mother and with us kids was just one extended stay—especially when he sat on the porch tapping his foot and staring off into the distance, remembering how he had jumped trains, had been in this place and that. But we also knew he would never beat us—never raise his hand against my mother. And while Es¬tella's anger, meanness, and fear were apparent, we also felt we belonged to her, that we were part of her. We knew that she would never throw us away.