Workshop: Dance and/as Technology

Dance and/as Technology: More-than-Human Choreographies, Performers and Audiences aim to bring together scholars, choreographers, technicians and dancers to talk and think about the intersection of dance and today’s new and emergent media such as virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR), robotics, motion capture technology (mocap), artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and other animative and choreographic interfaces.

Scientists, filmmakers, artists and choreographers have historically used dance to test and experiment with new media, such as electric stage light, film, and animation techniques like rotoscoping. This history frames dance as a networked, relational practice which extends the notion of “body” beyond the human as a discrete entity. The dancer (relational, responsive, trainable, curious) is an excellent tool through which to explore both the limits of new technologies, and the effects of those technologies on the human body; in combination with interactive and immersive technologies, dance also contributes to the production of new kinds of non-human, animal, machinic and abstract bodies, choreographies and audiences.

Because dance is traditionally associated with the expression of human interiority/emotion and live, in-the-flesh performance, it is often framed as technology’s opposite. As a starting point, however, we contend that dance and technology are not oppositional terms. 

Presenters will be responding to many of the following questions:

• Where does the organic human body exist (or persevere) in dance, especially in relation to “bodies” such as robots, avatars, digital renderings and filmic or animated traces?
• When does kinetics become performance?
• How do new capacities for virtuosity (digital plasticity and the immortal, unfettered animated or robotic body) impact both the possibilities of dance creation and the audience’s experience of watching dance?
• How are robotic, digital or holographic dancers different (affectively, ethically, materially) from human dancers and what are the procedures that construct and govern them?
• How do new media forms simultaneously circumscribe and expand our notions of the dancing body and its limits?
• How do markers of difference such as race and gender factor into new media dance projects, where the dancing body might be abstracted or morphed beyond its corporeal politics?
• How do histories of surveillance and biometric governance come to bear on/produce or inform dancing bodies and choreographic practices?
• What role does screen-based, immersive or interactive media play in the consumption and circulation of mediated dance, and how do new and innovative methods of screeningdance works change our relationship to watching such performances?
• How might collaborations between dancers, choreographers and new media practitioners open up new channels for relationality and imaginative futures? How do these new technologies and modes of creation fundamentally change the practice and experience of dance (or of being a dancer, or a choreographer) today? What new forms of work, affective labour or even exploitation emerge from these collaborations?
• What value (commercial, aesthetic, emotional, etc.) does dance hold today, for new media artists and practitioners?
• How does the rise of AI under advanced capitalism inform dance as a practice, institution, and cultural exchange?
• What kinds of affects, philosophies and critiques emerge from today’s collaborations between dance and new media?