SIGNATURES
Artistic research into signature moves, embodied knowledge, and the translation of dance into digital and material forms.
Artistic Research Project
2025–ongoing
Based in Basel
Status: Research and Development
→ Read the latest Research Note
Introduction
SIGNATURES investigates characteristic movements developed within Breaking and the forms of knowledge, authorship, and identity embodied in them. Through conversations with dancers, movement-based recordings, and artistic experiments, the project examines how movement can be translated into digital and material forms beyond the performing body, and what may be preserved, transformed, or lost in this process.
Research Questions
What makes a movement a signature?
How does a movement become a recognisable, individually developed form?
Where is authorship located in dance?
Does authorship reside in a single movement, a quality of movement, a sequence, or in the relationship between body, experience, and context?
What remains when movement is separated from the body?
Which qualities are retained when movement appears as a trace, data structure, image, or object?
How can embodied knowledge be translated without being reduced?
How can embodied and culturally situated knowledge be transferred into other media without reducing it to a purely technical form?
Starting Point: Breaking and Signature Moves
Signature Moves, Style, and Embodied Knowledge – Breaking as a Culture of Individual Form
Breaking is a cultural practice in which individuality is developed through repetition, exchange, transformation, and response. Dancers learn within a shared vocabulary, yet are expected to shape this material into a distinct movement language of their own. Style emerges not only through what is performed, but through how movement is approached, connected, timed, and inhabited.
Within this context, a signature may appear as a specific move, pose, sequence, transition, quality, or recurring logic. It can be immediately recognizable, but it may also be more subtle: a particular rhythm, use of space, relationship to the floor, or way of reorganizing familiar elements. A signature is therefore not understood here as an isolated formal invention, but as an embodied configuration shaped by experience, memory, training, cultural knowledge, and personal interpretation.
SIGNATURES takes this process of individual formation as its starting point. The project examines how such movement-based authorship can be perceived, described, recorded, and translated into other media without separating it from the cultural and bodily conditions through which it emerged.
Research Fields
A. Conversations
Conversations with breakers about recognisability, originality, memory, style, movement language, and the development of individual forms.
B. Movement and Embodied Knowledge
An investigation of movement as physical, cultural, and biographical knowledge.
C. Capture and Translation
Experiments with digital processes through which movement can be observed, recorded, and translated into other media states.
D. Material and Artistic Experiments
An investigation into how movement can appear as an image, volume, spatial trace, or material object.
Current State of Research
July 2026
SIGNATURES is currently in an early research and development phase. The initial focus is on how breakers understand their own signature moves: What makes a movement recognisable? Where does individual authorship become visible? And can a signature be reduced to a single movement at all?
Initial conversations with dancers indicate that a signature can manifest in different ways: as a specific movement, pose, or sequence, but also as a quality of movement, an attitude, or a recurring stylistic logic. The provisional terms Signature Move, Signature Pose, and Signature Style are not used as fixed categories, but as tools for comparing different perspectives.
In parallel, initial methods for digitally capturing the body and movement have been tested. Experiments with motion capture, photogrammetry, and video-based recordings reveal both the artistic potential and the limitations of these technologies. A central question is which qualities of a movement remain when it is removed from its temporal, physical, and cultural context.
The next phase of research will focus on further conversations, more precise recording situations, and initial controlled translation experiments. The resulting observations will be published continuously in the SIGNATURES Journal.