2022

International residency

About the residency

A 6-month residency for Dancers and Creative Technologists: Building an international network for virtual dance collaboration

Funded through the AHRC highlight fund responding to the ‘UN International Year of the Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021’ this project built a global network of diverse international dance companies to promote sustained and inclusive economic growth, foster innovation, provide opportunities, benefits and empowerment for all.

The research objectives of this project were: 

  1. Can we create an international network of dance groups who are able to collaborate remotely towards shared choreographic practice in virtual spaces? 

  2. Can remotely connected creative work practices facilitate a form of meaningful and poetic dance communication across geographical, cultural, generational, and economic boundaries? 

  3. Can digital collaborative networks permit meaningful knowledge and cultural exchange without direct physical co-presence, and what are the limitations of this? 

  4. Is there a sustainable green economic model for international collaborative dance practice in virtual spaces - without flying whole companies across the world? 

  5. Can motion-captured dance have greater historical or educational value for cross-cultural knowledge-sharing than the existing forms of video-recording?

  6. Can our motion capture streaming framework, in combination with new machine learning processes, make collaborations more affordable, accessible, and inclusive of those normally ‘left behind'’ in digital performance practice? 

Through a programme of training, mentoring, and support we provided teams of dancers and creative technologists with both the kit and the skills to co-create original dance work in virtual spaces and across great distances. Our teams stretched from Thailand and India to Malta, the UK, Brazil, and to the western seaboard of the USA.

Showcase | Being Human Festival

In November 2022 we presented a showcase of the outputs of a six-month digital dance research residency,  sharing experimental work with motion capture in remote choreographic collaboration. This showcase was a combination of live, immersive screen-based performance, in-person interactive performance, and interactive installation. It was presented in a hybrid in-person and live-streamed mode with remote dancers performing together within a virtual and interactive environment.

This event was presented as part of the Being Human festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities, taking place 10–19 November 2022. Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with generous support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org.

Work was presented in partnership with project partners Target3D, Akram Khan Company, Alexander Whitley Dance Company, and Noitom Mocap.

Documentary

Trailer

Teams & Artists

Sumedha Bhattacharyya sumedhabhattacharyya.com // @kathagrapher

Sumedha Bhattacharyya is an India-based interdisciplinary dance artist, researcher, educator, dance filmmaker and a primary caregiver, expanding the potential of camera, traditional dance, mythology and gender. Her practice is formulated in a quest to understand what happens in the in-betweens, in the happening, unfolding of a choreographic process.  Pursuing her doctoral studies in Spatial Arts at Jindal School of Art and Architecture, her research focuses on understanding the relationship between woman and the machine (camera), incorporating surveillance, memory, space and spectatorship.

Joaquina Salgado @joaquina.s

A new media artist from La Plata, Argentina, Joaquina Salgado combines emerging technologies to create otherworldly and abstract images, XR experiences, interactive virtual worlds and A/V performances. Her explorations between the physical and oneiric worlds converge in the creation of synthetic environments using real-time technologies, digital sculpting and photo-scan. Her work reflects on internal programming and the relationship we generate with machines as an interactive mirror.

Water Nodes

We are water and memory is what the body carries,

Like information, like energy. 

Water is memory.

Responding to the insurmountable and collective grief, loss and the heaviness of memory experienced during the afterlife of the pandemic, Water Nodes is a hybrid immersive installation /performance (live +remote) that reminisces cross-cultural, personal, maternal histories inherited/passed on in the body. By evoking family archive photographs, spiritual and mythological references, the performance considers in the quality of water a passage for memories to flow, contain and dissipate.

  • Choreographers: Aabshaar Wakhloo, Sumedha Bhattacharyya

    Dancers: Supriya Babbar, Andréa Moraes ( special participation from Brazil)

    Creative technologist: Joaquina Salgado

    Sound designer: Padmanabhan J

    Studio and performance space :

    Khuli Khirkee and Studio Sama New Delhi

Letta Shtohryn

Letta Shtohryn investigates the entangled relationship between the physical and digital realm. She explores human-nonhuman collaborations and embodiment through a posthumanist lens, considering non-human life forms, machines, avatars, aliens, monsters, ghosts. As a method, Letta employs speculative investigations, world building and storytelling. Her tools range between virtual reality, augmented reality, textile, sculpture, video, machinima and imagery. Letta is the founder of digital platform Whatdowedonow.xyz and is Research Excellence Award Fellow at The Immersion Lab, University of Malta.

Lois. Monstrous encounters.

Based on factual and fictional experiences in confined underground spaces, this remote dance collaboration explores the moment when isolated life forms encounter the Primary World. The monstrous self and the monstrous others experience inner and outer transformation of their body~mind states, asking how to share experiences and relate to one another after a period of isolation? Can some experiences be explained / related to at all? And whose voices are believed and considered valid?

  • Technologist: Letta Shtohryn (Ukraine/Malta)

    Dancers:, Florinda Camilleri (Malta), Rebekah Heathcote(UK), Lena Wolfe (NYC)

Sufee Yama

Sufee Yama is a Creative Technologist and a VR/AR experience designer from Thailand, her works span across Interactive AR, Interactive VR film and animation, 360 video, Mixed Reality Performance and Mixed Reality video. Her personal R&D experiments are brought to use for brand commercials, documentaries, movies, events and exhibitions for companies and organizations like The Guardian US, The Japan Foundation, Goethe-Institut, FABLAB , Thailand Government Agencies and more.

Pichet Klunchun Dance Company

Pichet Klunchun Dance Company was founded by Pichet Klunchun, an independent solo dance artist and Choreographer who specialized in Thai classical dance and contemporary choreography.  His vision is to introduce Thai classical dance to the world, to preserve and maintain the charm of Thai classical dance to new generations. Pichet connects ancient philosophy and beliefs to the modern world by his mind-body bridging systematic training, and his contemporary practice has earned recognition internationally.

Ghrāṇa - Vijñāna

A Thai contemporary remote performance that allows the audience to access the performers' internal space to witness memories and experiences that are triggered by scents, causing chaos to their mind and body. This metaverse dance experience will reveal their fight and struggle, and how the battle with themselves ends. Ghrāṇa - Vijñāna is Olfactory consciousness in buddhism.

  • Creative Technologist: Sufee Yama

    Choreography: Julaluck Eakwattanapun, Tas Chongchadklang

    Advisor: Pichet Klunchun

    Concept development: Julaluck Eakwattanapun

    Sound design: Tas Chongchadklang

    Visual design: Sufee Yama, Juliah Champion

Ânima Dance Company & Afro-Sul Dance

Ânima Dance Company and Afro-Sul Dance are led by two of the most important choreographers in southern Brazil, both currently engaged in research with UFRGS, Porto Alegre to developing digital choreographic resources to document and preserve Brazilian dance culture. 

Since 1974 Iara Deodoro of Afro-Sul has addressed issues of black diaspora, gender and age through her choreographies, developing her own dance technique: dança afro-gaúcha.

Also since the 70s, Eva Schul of Ânima has based her practice in the embodiment of non-effort, movement flow and the use of improvisation.

Ainslee Robson

LA-based, Cleveland native Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer and media artist, and a Sundance Interdisciplinary 'Art of Practice' Fellow. She pushes beyond monolithic narratives of Africa and Blackness and instead places emphasis on the continent as a site of knowledge-generation and complexity. Her backgrounds in philosophy and new media render a critical and multifaceted approach to her emancipatory narrative strategies. She crafts worlds focusing on decolonial narratives of resistance that deconstruct identity, race, gender, perception, hierarchy and colonial legacies using film and emerging technologies in digital art.

Pedro Rocha Martin

With an inviting approach, Pedro, brazilian new media artist, accompanies the oscillations and frequencies that conflict in the contemporary world, seeks and investigates ways to nurture the relational field between realities, the constructions of symbols, and the various cultural spheres. In multiple platforms, his work lists a reading linked to the involvement of the receiver. Pedro uses the audiovisual language as a guideline support for the development of his work and as a tool for study and self-knowledge, combined with the demystifying use of the new digital media as well as analog and digital electronics, he seeks to communicate directly and indirectly with the subjective feelings of the public.

Weaving through the space mass

The dance performance proposes to make visible the weave of space and its manipulation by the dancers. Considering the space around the body has a certain density, when in movement, the body is not only sustained by this mass, but also manipulates and modifies it.

  • Direction: Mônica Dantas and Eva Schul

    Direction assistant: Suzi Weber

    Choreography: Eva Schul

    Dancers: Eduardo Severino and Fernanda Santos

    Music: Celau Moreira

    Creative Technologist: Pedro Rocha

    Technologist assistant: Dayandra Araújo

    Production: Andréa Moraes

Alma Negra

Inspired by the archetypes of the female orishas Oxum, Iansã, Iemanjá and Nanã, the performance proposes an encounter between past and present, between the Pan-African roots of Afro-Sul and the experience of dance in the metaverse and confirms that the future is ancestral. Looking back is key to a better future!

  • Direction: Mônica Dantas and Iara Deodoro

    Direction assistant: Suzi Weber

    Choreography: Iara Deodoro

    Dancers: Edjana Deodoro, Taila Santos de Souza, Iara Deodoro

    Creative and Music Direction: Paulo Romeu

    Creative Technologist: Pedro Rocha and Ainslee Robson

    Technologist assistant: Dayandra Araújo

    Production: Andréa Moraes

Katie Dale-Everett

Katie Dale-Everett is Artistic Director of Katie Dale-Everett Dance, Sussex Dance Network and Co-Artistic Director of Kabecca Films. Since graduating in 2014 with a 1st class degree in Choreography from Falmouth University she has been supported by organisations including Arts Council England, The Point's Associate Artist Programme, Screen South, Channel 4, The Barbican, Studio Wayne McGregor's QuestLab Network, and Dance Woking's Associate Artist Scheme. Across her work is a desire to use creativity as a way to create kinder, more interconnected and better-considered communities.

Erin Cuevas

Erin Cuevas is an architect and creative director.  She leads Project XYZ, a collaboration between architects, choreographers, and film-makers, and previously co-founded and led her own architecture practice at Curious Minds Los Angeles.  Her work has been showcased through venues including the LA Dance Project Studios, the A+D Architecture and Design Museum, and various academic conferences.  Erin holds a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and teaches digital media and design courses at the University of Southern California.

Matt Conway

Matt Conway is a Computational Design Leader working with a focus on parametric design, geometric approaches, interactive and immersive technologies, and integrated practice. He is co-founder of HomeMakeLabs, a video game, interactive installation and visualization studio. He received a Master of Architecture (M.Arch.I) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and lectures at USC and UCLA in coding, computational design, and geometry. His research work focuses on programming literacy and exploring architectural design through contemporary digital methods

Playscape: How to Build A Galaxy

‘Playscape: How to Build A Galaxy’ is an immersive performance installation that combines dance, motion capture technology and projected celestial graphics to open up new possibilities for physical, social and digital connection. This work is made particularly for young people who experience anxiety in social interaction, but become motivated when engaging with technology, allowing them to discover new ways of sharing space. We welcome everyone and anyone to give it a try.

  • Artistic Director/Choreographer: Katie Dale-Everett (Katie Dale-Everett Dance)

    Creative Technologists: Erin Cuevas, Matthew Conway and Wahei Lam

    Producer: Frances Livesey

    Dancers: Ed Elford and Gabby Sanders

    Composer: Henry Bird

    Costume Design: Laura Boseley

    Dramaturg: Joumana Mourad

    Additional Funders: Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants and Creative Newhaven Grassroots Arts Award

Clarice Hilton (Goldsmiths)

Neal Coghlan

Kat Hawkins

Susanna Dye

in collaboration with Candoco Dance Company (UK)

Beyond T-Pose: challenging normative assumptions in MOCAP

This work-in-progress deconstructs mocap data away from its normative forms, reconstructing the data to create customised visual expressions and movement interactions. In a series of short vignettes, dancers will move together through a co-created vocabulary, pushing the boundaries of what self-representation, interaction and communication can be in the metaverse. This is the culmination of a series of workshops with Candoco dance company and associated dancers Kat Hawkins, Susannah Dye, Ted Wilkinson, Paulina Porwolik and Dermot Farrell.

  • Technologist and researcher: Clarice Hilton

    Digital artist and technologist: Neal Coghlan