ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of existing practices that employ motion capture in various strands of dance research and practice. It expresses that, rather than motion capture not being able to see the meaning of dance, the real difficulty lies in the effort it takes us to see how motion capture data starts to become meaningful. The chapter describes what happens in the first moments when the dancer steps inside the motion capture setting. It analyzes Emergence, a performance that brings together a dancer and a 'digital performance agent' to illustrate the dancer's experience in the motion capture setting. The chapter demonstrates that even though motion capture is used for analytical purposes in dance, the use of motion capture as an analytical tool is a choice that should be recognized as culturally significant, because it points to specific assumptions of how dance can be mediated and 'known'.
