“Let Me in Through Your Window”

This chapter emerges from a research-creation project conducted using MikuMikuDance (MMD), a freeware program where 3D digital models can be choreographed into various dance sequences through the use of motion data and keystroke animation. The program was originally produced for the Vocaloid character and Japanese hologram popstar, Hatsune Miku. In the resulting dance translation project, titled “Let Me in Through Your Window,” the author used her own body and a Microsoft Kinect to feed the choreography for British singer Kate Bush’s iconic song, “Wuthering Heights” into the MMD interface, prompting Miku and Bush to dance “together.” This chapter explores the ways in which dance choreography passes between bodies, virtual and organic, dispersing agency often attributed to humans alone. The author allows her datafied gestures to dance through and with Miku’s avatar, thereby relinquishing puppetry in exchange for the machine’s lively, glitchy output. Following Legacy Russell’s theory of glitch feminism, “Let Me in Through Your Window” proposes the glitch as an improvisational dance that resists choreographic hierarchies of control and MMD’s grid-like governance. Bergen’s project attends to the porous nature of dancing bodies in order to reveal moments of posthuman collectivity, contagion, and relation.