Dance playing with stroboscopic perception

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfVXRn6dNJ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB1ZnvCuXzg&feature=related

David Parson’s Caught (1982) demonstrates the use of a strobe light in dance. I think it provides a really interesting way to think about how our brain puts together single moments to create a whole. In this example, the singular moment of a dancer suspended in air has a very different effect than the overall “gestalt” of a dancer leaping over a span of seconds. The long clip shows the whole dance (the strobe light comes in after a few minutes), but the quality is poorer. Watch the excerpt to get a better sense of how the dancer’s movement quality is altered through stroboscopic perception.