When Apple introduced the iPhone, in 2007, the smartphone ceased being an object of casual, sloppy use. With its beautiful screen, large and fragile like a baby’s head, the iPhone called out, “Handle me with care,” and, “Make sure you don’t put me in the same pocket as your keys.” Yet, in the intervening seven years, the people who code apps have encouraged us to trust the structural integrity of our phones. They want us to use iPhones as levels when we hammer in nails to hang our pictures, or as flashlights when we go stumbling through the dark, risking possible face-plants, or at least broken screens. And then last month, a group of game developers introduced Bounden, an app that invites users to dance, but also lays bare our obsessively protective relationship with our phones.
Created by the Dutch design shop Game Oven, Bounden works like this: two players hold the phone from opposite ends and guide a cursor through a sort of maze on the screen while music plays; the shape of the maze forces the players to twist, spin, and loop around and under each other, as in a dance. The underlying choreography was developed by Ernst Meisner of the Dutch National Ballet, and the app contains videos of company members performing the finished dances. When executed by professionals, the pieces all tell a strange story about two people who are terrified to drop an iPhone. Bounden begins to play music, a romantic passage like Adolphe Adam’s “Giselle,” or a jaunty march that recalls Ludwig Minkus’s “Don Quixote.” The phone beseeches the couple to dance, and dance they do, never looking at one another, always grasping their tiny, fragile overlord.
When played by untrained dancers, Bounden creates jagged, awkward movement patterns that resemble a rather abstract downtown performance. It’s a partner dance, but it’s not clear who, if anyone, is meant to lead. Sometimes, you find yourself pulling on the phone, or being pulled along. It’s like using a Ouija board, but instead of a little wooden planchette you are tugging at a two-hundred-dollar piece of technology that contains your entire existence.
There’s a certain sheepishness that comes with guarding so fiercely what is, after all, a mass-produced object. Bounden is immensely enjoyable, and it made me laugh—perhaps at the unexpected proximity between me and the friends I played with, or at the uncoordinated jumbles of limbs we created. “The body says what words cannot,” Martha Graham, the great modern choreographer, once told the Times. In my living room, my arms were tangled with my husband’s when I felt my fingers slipping off the phone’s slick surface. Be cool, I thought to myself, this is meant to be joyful. But my body was screaming out “Don’t drop the phone!”
Photograph courtesy Bounden.
