Courtney Crowder

ccrowder@dmreg.com

A dancer twirled, pirouette after pirouette, in the corner of Ballet Des Moines’ studio on a recent spring afternoon. Gliding across a small stage, the dancer’s arm flourished with the ornamentation of the music and punctuated each pass of the platform with a staccato embellishment.

But this particular dancer was distinctly different from the men and women relevéing and jeté-ing nearby.

This ballerina isn’t human — it’s a robot.

Manibus, as this flapjack-sized dancing robot is called, is the creation of local engineer-turned-artist Amenda Tate Corso, Ballet Des Moines’ newest artist-in-residence. The Manibus project, which captures a dancer’s movements via a motion-sensor app and translates them into a painting, marks Ballet Des Moines' first foray into the emerging national trend of marrying computational technology with dance. Given the enthusiastic response of the company’s eight dancers and the public, it won’t be their last inroad into the digital-dance space, said Ballet Des Moines Executive Director Laurel Knox.

Created from an amalgamation of a childhood spent at science and math camps and a decades-long career in jewelry and metalsmithing, Corso said she wants her twirling creation to be as educational as it is artistic. To Corso, Manibus’ main goal is to create a space for creative symbiosis, for an exchange of ideas. As Corso learns about the sensor’s capabilities from the dancers, she hopes performers can glean new information on how their bodies move through time and space from the lines left on the page.

Eventually, Corso wants to take Manibus to underserved Iowa schools and community centers where children will be able to wear the app and see their movements painted on canvas, giving them access to cultural experiences — dance, painting, even robotics — they may not have otherwise. Graduating in a class of 26 from Melcher-Dallas High, Corso, 41, said she knows what missing out on the culture that others take for granted feels like. Advanced art classes weren't an easily accessible option for her until college, and she didn’t see her first ballet until she was about 40.

“I think of how much my life changed after I was able to look at things from that different perspective, that creative perspective,” she said. “What if I was able to have that awareness earlier on? How would my life be different?”

Corso’s creation, which is built from pieces of magnetic building kits her kids play with and held together by rubber bands and binder clips, has an accessibility about it, a “low-fi” nature. It doesn’t look made in a laboratory, she said, and that’s exactly what she wants. She hopes those who interact with Manibus will realize that anyone can be both scientific and artistic.

Just like a ballet duet, logic and creativity can keep perfect rhythm when paired together.

***

Dance, by its very nature, is fleeting.

“You get this swelling, like this emotional high, and then all of a sudden it's over…,” Corso said, recalling seeing her first ballet, Ballet Des Moines’ annual production of “The Nutcracker.” “So I wanted a way to take that and make it into something that had a life beyond just that moment. I wanted to translate that moment into something that I could look at and be like, 'I remember the feeling I felt when that happened.' ”

The question of how to make the intangible tangible bounced around Corso’s head for years after she saw that ballet. She’s a problem solver by nature, so this seemingly unanswerable question bothered her.

Even though she’s an artist, she’s always leaned toward the rational and the structural in life. Corso always wanted to be a mechanical engineer, but halfway through college she realized she “didn’t want to design refrigerators for the rest of her life,” so she switched from mechanical engineering to creative metal work, which was "something more expressive," she said.

Last fall, as she was taking apart her one of her daughter’s latest magnetic creations — a Harry Potter-themed snake that was able to move via a Bluetooth app — the answer to the dance quandary she'd had since seeing "The Nutcracker" came to her.

If she could pin the Bluetooth app to a dancer, she could rig it to send a signal based on movement to a paintbrush that could traverse around a page. Later, she would perfect the idea so that the final picture wasn’t a simple mapping of where the dancer had been — “The choreographer could probably just draw that on a page,” she said — but was a representation of the dynamics, tilt, motion and, most importantly, emotions of the dance.

“As soon as I had that moment where I was like, ‘Wait, this responds to movement,’ that was, for me, a very direct or literal way to represent ballet in art,” she said.

***

As Corso was testing out prototypes, Ballet Des Moines was looking to raise its profile. Knox had recently joined Ballet Des Moines as its new executive director and discovered that only one out of her four artistic friends even knew there was a ballet company in Des Moines.

“We needed to expand our audience, so we thought we will provide a platform for new or established artists to get in front of our patrons and, in exchange, people that love their work will be introduced to our dancers,” Corso said.

Enter: Manibus.

While the dance world interacting with digital and computational technology isn’t new — conferences were held on the topic in the late 1990s — it is still an idea that lives on the fringes. Many traditional dance companies, like Ballet Des Moines, aren’t dedicating time or resources to working on ventures combining tap and tech.

But slowly, more groups are coming to the understanding that technology can be used to enhance a performance as well as bring new audiences to one of the world’s oldest art forms, said Dan Fine, a newly hired assistant professor at the University of Iowa who studies the intersection of digital media and performance.

Knox agreed: “Technology is how young people communicate. If we want to get young people to the ballet, we had to start thinking about pairing the digital with the dance.”

***

Most days, Corso can be found on the fringes of Ballet Des Moines’ studio. As the company prepares for its performance of “Snow White," Corso flits from dancer to dancer, removing the phone that contains the sensor from one character and strapping it to another, before returning to hover over Manibus.

Think of it like a Fitbit, she said.

"But instead of giving us statistical data," she added, "it is giving us emotional data."

Corso stirred with excitement as the Prince and Snow White began to dance a duet. The last time she tracked these two, you could clearly see the difference between the male and the female roles in ballet, she said.

“I used grey paint for the woman and black for the man last time,” she said. “You could see the grey flourishes, and the grey was all swirly and twirly, and the black was all about structure and straight lines, which is the role of the male. It was reflective of two different types of dancers.”

Focusing back on Manibus, she watches the gadget, gently turning it when it hits the canvas’ edge or lifting it up and down when the dancers exit and enter the stage. As the human dancers lift and run and turn and jump, Corso and her mechanical dancer seem lost in their own world, a pair of ballerinas performing their own personal pas de deux in paint.

Manibus Exhibit

See an exhibit of the pieces created by Ballet Des Moines' artist-in-residence Amenda Tate Corso and Manibus.

5-7 p.m., Friday, Moxie Gallery, 505 E. Grand Ave.

"Snow White"

The final production in the 2016-17 Ballet Des Moines lineup.

1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., April 15, Civic Center, 221 E. Walnut Ave.

Tickets range from $19-57.50, visit desmoinesperformingarts.org to purchase tickets.