April: Looking Forward to Summer
Announcing our summer offerings and sharing insight from one of our gallery artists!
Stop by and see us on Sunday May 3 at the Chestnut Hill Home & Garden Festival! Our booth will be right in front of the lab at 8004 Germantown Ave. In the meantime, read on about our summer offerings — July will be a big month in the lab!
Week-long course on movement analysis and notation
What is the alphabet of body language? How does bodily movement communicate meaning? How do swipes, pinches, and taps form a choreography between human and phone? How would you redesign this dance? Certified Movement Analyst and affiliated faculty with the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies Cat Maguire will come to the RAD Lab for a week of instruction in choreobotics, movement analysis, and notation. Training in embodied movement is not only a tool for dancers (in choreography creation and archiving work) but also engineers designing human interfaces or bio-inspired systems as well as people who want to interrogate their own physical relationship with an increasingly technology-filled environment. This series of classes is designed to give participants an opportunity to revisit and interrogate their own embodied practices.
The material for all of these classes is informed by the textbook on choreobotics from MIT Press Making Meaning with Machines: Somatic Strategies, Choreographic Technologies, and Notational Abstractions through a Laban/Bartenieff Lens. Students will learn how to examine movement from five distinct components (the what, where, when, how and for whom of movement), use a language to describe movement (an alphabet of “body-language”), and notate movement phrases with symbols. Here’s a full look at the course plan:
July 13: An introduction to movement notation
Students will be guided through a creative movement experience that will illuminate a system of movement notation, the BESST System, based in Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals. We will move together and build phrases of action to teach and share with each other, grappling with how to write movement down by practicing kinesthetic attunement as well as creating vertical action stroke motifs - exploring what choreography can emerge from fully embodying these written scores.
July 14: What is moving?
Students will learn about the Body Component of the BESST System, including: finding a neutral baseline starting with tuning into our breath and beginning moving with it (weight-sensing and flow-sensing), identifying and experiencing patterns of the body’s motion such as how we change support and locomote through space (basic body actions), the somatic support available for movement, both guiding principles regarding connectivity (Bartenieff Fundamental principles) and fundamental movement sequences such as thigh lift and pelvic shifts (Basic Six sequences) that allow for full body integration and connectivity to support efficiency in moving in our uprightness in relationship to gravity.
July 15: Where and when is the movement happening?
Students will learn about the Space and Time components of the BESST System, including: moving in a body frame (kinesphere) versus a room frame, gestures in differing reach spaces (near, middle, far), zones, levels, and pathways (approaches to kinesphere) as well as differentiating 1D, 2D and 3D spatial expression, as well as creating temporal context and utilizing sequencing strategies and phrasing. For example, students will create a short movement phrase that goes from a 1D expression (dimensional), to a 2D expression (planal), to a 3D expression (diagonal) and then re-order it to 2D, 3D, 1D. Comparing the two phrases will allow demonstrate how the movement expression transforms through re-ordering the beginning, middle and end (phrasing).
July 16: How and for whom is the movement happening?
Students will learn about the Effort Shape components of the BESST System, including: qualities of movement expression such as dab, wring, flick, press (basic effort actions) and their relationship to the body’s changing form (shape). For example, by examining the relationship (affinity) between effort factors (weight, space, time, flow) and shape qualities, (rising, sinking, spreading, enclosing, advancing, retreating), we will experience how changes in the body’s breath, spine and core musculature support the effort qualities of dynamic expression and intent.
July 17: An advanced look at notation and symbols
This class will deepen the participants’ experience of notation by offering advanced details, introducing more complex symbols to deepen simple vertical action stroke scores by replacing the action strokes with symbols from the BESST System that best convey the design of those actions. Students will trade scores to experience embodying movement from notation and how notation is an abstraction that defines various senses of the concept of unison. By performing two variations of the same score, students will note similarities and differences of interpretations to understand the myriad choices that exist in complex bodily action.
Each class is 90 minutes — July 13-17, 9-10:30am — and $30 (or $125 for the set of 5 classes) and no prior formal movement training in any style is required. Email cat@the-rad-lab.org for more information and/or to register!
Work-in-progress showing from our artists-in-residence
When soldiers wave their helmets at the 38th parallel, most people (human subjects in our $2m National Science Foundation (NSF) AI infrastructure grant) label the scene “angry.” Our team’s experts see joyful celebration — expansive, upward action with a light quality. The same bodies, the same gestures, yet two completely different emotional readings. How does the same movement translate to such disjoint meanings?
To begin to answer these questions, the RAD Lab is building a large-scale interactive installation that explores the ways our environment affects the perception of movement and that will serve as a basic feasibility test of the NSF-funded AI infrastructure. The installation uses a room-scale robotic environment that shifts between eight distinct configurations: light, sound, and a built environment that changes scale, shape, and speed, framing identical human movement in radically different ways. The insight that people read emotion differently — and that environment, not just the body, often drives that gap — is the animating question of both the art and the science.
Our team of artists-in-residence include a range of disciplines and artistic and academic practices. Louisa Pancoast is a contemporary dance artist and choreographer whose research with roboticist Nialah Wilson-Small has been published by ACM HRI and presented at IEEE ICRA; this duo brings the movement and choreographic intelligence the installation depends on. Shenaia Turner, a designer and roboticist, specializes in responsive architectural environments and robotic fabrication — she is focusing on the physical environment itself. Darren Woodland Jr. works at the intersection of sound, movement, and immersive technology, contributing the sonic and narrative dimensions of the experience. He is leading the prototyping of the electro-mechanical components. Guilherme Zanchetta, a sound artist and researcher, brings interactive audio systems, computational music, and notation systems expertise.
This team has created a concept that is ideally suited to that project’s required feasibility study: showing that the database can power the behavior of a robotic platform, connecting human expression to machine action. This work builds on the lab’s existing programming while opening a new register of public engagement: immersive, research-integrated, and explicitly concerned with what it means to misread another person’s emotional state and to store shadows of embodied experiences in data. The artist-in-residence will be in residence July 13-17 and will work in public, rehearsing and refining the human performance component in the RAD Lab’s street-facing space on Germantown Ave, creating an ongoing invitation to the neighborhood to follow the work-in-progress and view it in our showing on July 18. Stay tuned for details and timing of the event.
Summer camps in the RAD Lab
If this programming — our approach to engineering and the arts — might interest your child, consider registering for one of our two project-based summer camps at the intersection of robotics and dance, i.e., “choreobotics” as featured in a recent Dance Magazine cover story. Learning objectives include:
Embodying different movement phrases with expressive clarity
Identifying sensors and actuators in a variety of machines
Building basic circuits and programming a microcontroller to relate inputs from sensors and outputs by actuators in intentional design
Noticing differences in natural and artificial bodies, particularly their capacities for movement
Using a form of motif related to Labanotation
Practicing methodology for observing bodily (human and robot) movement and applying annotations rooted in a formal system of movement notation
Giving and receiving descriptive feedback (based on The Field’s Fieldwork process for artists)
Recognizing the role of context, bias, and human preference in creating the annotations
Understanding the potential for this methodology in human-machine interaction scenarios
The camps are $300 per student (scholarships are available) and will be held 9am-3pm July 6-10 for 13-17 year olds and July 20-24 for 8-12 year olds. Email xandee@the-rad-lab.org for more information and/or to register!
Come Visit Us!
GALLERY, LIBRARY & SHOP HOURS: Thu-Sat 12-4pm
Visit our public spaces that invite reflection on technology and bodies
MOVEMENT HOUR: Thu 4pm [On pause till Summer!]
Physical explorations supplemented with movement notation
WRITING HOUR: Fri 11am [On pause till Summer!]
A weekly writing group with an emphasis on describing physical experience
STORY HOUR: Sat 11am
Exploring our favorite children’s stories with movement analysis
ATELIER HOURS
Email hello@the-rad-lab.org to apply
SUMMER CAMPS
Teens (ages 13-17): July 6-10, 9am-3pm
Big kids (ages 8-12): July 20-24, 9am-3pm
Enrollment limited to 10 for each camp. Cost is $300 per student with scholarships available. Email hello@the-rad-lab.org with questions and/or to secure a spot!
UPCOMING EVENTS & PERFORMANCES
Arts&Eats Chestnut Hill — May 1, June 5, July 3
Join us as we stay open till 8pm on the first Friday of the month along with other art galleries on the hill!
Classes in Movement Analysis and Notation with Cat Maguire — July 13-17, 9-10:30am
Discover more about Laban Movement Analysis, Bartenieff Fundamentals, and the BESST System in this week-long series. $30 per class or $125 for the whole week. Email cat@the-rad-lab.org for more information and/or to register!
Artists-in-residence Work-in-Progress Showing — July 18
See what our artists-in-residence have been working on: an interactive installation where the whole room is the robot.
Philly-based Artists Panel — August 7
Join Prof. Lewis Colburn, Maddie Jones Rodriguez, and Dr. Nialah Wilson-Small for a panel discussing their works in our gallery.
FIELD TRIPS & WORKSHOPS
Email amy@the-rad-lab.org for more information if your organization, large or small, would like to visit our space or hold a workshop on choreobotics in yours!
An Interview With… Our first gallery artist
The very first artist committed to our gallery space was Zelda Thayer-Hansen. We connected after they cited some RAD Lab work in their thesis at Ohio University. Here’s a short conversation with Zelda about their process and point-of-view.
How and why did you become an artist? What interests led you to this work?
I hold the immense privilege of having been raised by artists. I grew up understanding that art and creative practice can and deserve to exist as a part of daily life – whether it becomes your full-time job or not. I had wonderful art teachers throughout grade school who encouraged me to explore media, keep sketchbooks as records of my progress and improvements, and to experiment with symbolism and context within my work.
In many ways, I still refer to these teachings as I create work presently, as I develop my experimental, responsive, research-based practice.
Tell us about your practice. What does an average day at work look like for you? What kind of mediums, including technology and software, do you use?
My practice is in a state of abnormal flux right now, as I am adjusting to life outside of undergrad. As a barista and an intern at Praxis Fiber Workshop, most of my practice emerges during my work breaks and after long days on my feet. I am continuously figuring out how to make work amidst the chaos and exhaustion of my current routine. I tend to use my sketchbooks as forms of daily inspiration, observation, and documentation. Often, to-do lists are present in my collage and performance works, as they help me organize my brain while I’m not working my day job. Observation drawings, short-hand notes, and abstract, gestural sketches form the visual vocabulary present within the tattoos I give and the large-scale drawings and paintings I create as parts of performance pieces.
I help run Praxis’s weekly community craft circle – where I get the chance to teach others how to knit and where we discuss art and life with other fiber artists in the greater Cleveland area. This internship helps me gain access to natural fibers for my mending and weaving processes – present within my garments for performance pieces.
I also teach violin, which helps me reframe how I approach music and sound as a playful, soothing practice, as opposed to one with strict regulations and expectations.
Who are your favorite artists (right now)?
What a difficult question!
Yoko Ono is high on my list – I got to see her huge show at MCA Chicago a few months ago and absolutely loved experiencing the sheer variety of media within this exhibition: photos, artifacts, replicas of past works and performances, etc. I work to perpetuate many of the performative dissemination and documentation techniques she has pioneered.
Hilary Hahn also comes to mind. I’ve studied violin since my seventh birthday. Growing up studying classical compositions, I would refer to her live recordings above anyone else’s. Her work with Hauschka on their album Silfra permanently altered the ways I approach my own instrument. Her work is masterful, experimental, and wholly expressive.
While my mental list of favorite widely-known artists is extensive, my true favorite artists are the ones I’ve studied with, learned from, and continue to connect with, even from afar. Social media, newsletters, phone calls, emails, snail mail, and craft meet-ups all help me stay up to date on what my contemporaries are creating, showing, researching, and thinking. How will I continue to learn if not from those learning and practicing around me?
You have two pieces hanging in the gallery, Directional Behaviors of an Annotated Body: Blue & Green. What would you like visitors to the gallery to know about these works?
These two pieces, as well as “Flock Logic,” the published work of Dr. Naomi Leonard and her team, inspired the title of my completed honors undergraduate thesis: Frock Logic: Directional Behaviors of an Annotated Body. These sibling works branch in multiple directions to encapsulate a great deal of my current practice. Based in research, mark-making, improvisation, meticulous planning, and movement, these works address the pressures of interpersonal interaction and perception. By juxtaposing structured, prescribed Laban movement symbols with free-flowing gestural marks born from improvisation, I bring into question the social parameters and expectations that exist regarding human behavior and embodiment. Here, I work to represent the movements of a trans body in space as it reaches from conformity towards fluidity.
Where else can we see your work?
I recently showed work in Chauncey, Ohio at Tend Space Art Center with a group of close friends and collaborators and performed my piece “Life as distraction as practice as discovery.” at Cleveland Public Theatre’s Soft Launch 2026 festival.
For future updates, find me on Instagram: @createchaoz.
Thank you Zelda for this vivid insight into the life and inspiration of a working artist! Your pieces are a wonderful addition to our gallery.
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