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Abstracts

Dancefilm: Sensory Experience and Embodied Knowledge
Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin

Over the last few years, Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin has been working on developing dancefilms, ranging from short films to virtual reality works. The encounter between dance and the moving image allows her to escape conventional discursive structures, drawing instead on a dramaturgy of bodies and movements. Through the presentation of two of her recent creations, Bodies of Water – an underwater VR work – and À bras-le-corps – a short dance film – she explores the possibilities of dancefilm as knowledge production. She examines the embodied and material nature of this practice, and how it draws on kinesthetic memory to capture and transmit sensitive knowledge and generate meaning in a way that engages the audience intellectually, sensorially and affectually. Finally, questioning how dancefilm can interrogate the issues of today’s society, she puts the material dimension of virtual presence back at the heart of the subject, bringing in other realities, other relational assemblages that affect bodies and seek to encourage a critical approach to move towards more ethical and responsible approaches of technologies.

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Body-based Storytelling, an Immersion in Live Performance and Mixed Reality: The Example of Eve 3.0
Margherita Bergamo

As defined by the neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz in his book Le sens du mouvement (1997), the human brain is an instrument of prediction, and therefore of simulation. In the course of evolution, its physiology has been confronted with natural, industrial and digital environments. In the realm of narrative structure, the presence of digital elements upon which to base our imagination has made it possible to fuel the experience of simulation. This fosters the construction of imaginary realities, where we can immerse ourselves by appealing to all our senses. When the receiver embraces the rules of a proposed narrative, a simulation activity is triggered and the narrative elements are supplemented by their imagination. As Janet Murray points out, each medium, depending on its characteristics, provokes a kind of enchantment, an invitation to identification and thus an immersion in the narrative experience. In the case of immersive digital media, “a completely different reality […] takes over our full attention, our entire perceptual apparatus” (Murray, 1997, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, p. 98). 
Let’s see what happens when we combine a narrative structure, immersive digital media, the integration of social presence and social interaction, and the kinaesthetic experience of the receiver. An exemple can be the participatory contemporary dance performance Eve 3.0 (Bergamo Meneghini, Boniotti, Desnoyers-Stewart and González Franco, 2023). The live performance engages the audience to experience different modes of involvement of their bodies, both with Virtual Reality devices and without, seeking to generate a resonance between performer, artwork and audience. The performer, Eve, encounters 6 characters in VR, each of whom is affected by a personality disorder including addiction, anxiety, depression, obsession, jealousy and paranoia. The kinaesthetic immersive format in VR produces a narrative embodied in the protagonist’s view through sight, hearing, touch and movement. The core focus of Eve 3.0 is the mediating role of dance to understand our emotional experience of reality. Dance is gradually brought in through the performer’s physical body, then the virtual bodies, until it takes over the participants who unleash their bodily expression, experiencing the intersection between their character’s emotions and their own through movement, also encouraging self-compassion and empathy.

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Person(hood), Afrikan Algorithms, & Technologies of the Body
Tawanda Chabikwa

The presentation addresses how a philosophical grounding of both “the body” and “technology” in diverse Africa-rooted notions of the body—including the African Diaspora—offers us new relationships to dance in the world. How Black Radical Thought, African Philosophy, and an expanded new relationship to our conception rhythm, catalyze new possibilities in technological innovation, pedagogic method, and novel collaborative praxis beyond the traditional world of dance. I introduce three Africana concepts that reshape normative body schemata and help AI innovation move closer toward sustainable and ethical innovation. When dance itself is understood as a technology, what then becomes possible? And because dance and the body are deeply entangled in this endeavor.  The question of which bodies, whose bodies, and personhood become deeply relevant. What is black Africana embodied knowledges are equitably translated into systems build to exclude, erase or dispose of black bodies. This presentation asks what new codes, algorithms, and technology become (or are already) available to humanity at large when we dissolve the boundaries of Euro-centered exceptionalism in technological innovation.

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Granular Choreography: Auto-Ethnographic Approaches to Technology and Dance Making
Marc-André Cossette & Alexandre Saulnier

How can we be, at the same time, makers of an artwork and observers of our creation process? What are the effects of the inevitable contaminations and circulations between both positions? In which manner can ethnographic observation contribute to artistic creation, and art making provide original insider perspectives? Developed over a year by the presenters, Granular Choreography is a research-creation project involving media art and ethnographic practices. The project brings together cutting edge technologies in the areas of motion capture, video game animation, and generative algorithms, with artistic practices of street dance and audiovisual performance. It involves technological developments, multicultural encounters, and the production of an exhibition piece. Meanwhile, the authors engaged in ethnographic, at times auto-ethnographic, observation. This talk analyzes Granular Choreography and reflects on the position of observant-maker the authors assumed. This position, in which one creates the very thing they observe, sits at the edge of ethnographic and making practices. It enables a form of productive reflexivity that both contributes to the definition of the artistic product and provides first hand insights on the creative process. The observant-maker position is contextualized in relation to work on reflexivity in the fields of sociology and anthropology (Ashmore, Bourdieu, Wacquant) and research-creation (Loveless, McNamara, Truman).

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The Use of Technology and AI in Circus Artist Training
Chris Gatti

The use of technology has progressively been adopted and welcomed into various aspects of fitness and sport. Circus has traditionally had a culture where all aspects of the work have embraced and leveraged the efforts of humans, both on stage and off. As artificial intelligence and digital technologies continue to advance, there is excitement for potential impact within circus but also uncertainty in the true impact. This talk will consider the use of new and evolving technologies in the development, advancement, and management of circus artists from the perspective of human performance and the potential of the human body. We will consider a number of aspects that contribute to the development and support of circus artists to understand if and where technological advancements may play a role.

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Figural Bodies: Challenging Ableism and Normative Body Forms in Immersive Dance Works
Clarice Hilton & Kat Hawkins

Kat Hawkins and Clarice Hilton have been collaborating and researching through creative practice disability centred design and immersive technology in dance performance. They explore the potential for joy in embodying codesigned representations of the self, recognising that in its current form immersive technology reinforces ableist and normative body forms. Their work is participatory and they have collaborated with performers and artists to develop the works and practice. In 2023 they presented Figural Bodies at SXSW in collaboration with Xan Dye, Ash Noel-Hirst and Neal Coglan. Kat and Clarice will present a vignette of their explorations instigating a discussion on who is included in the future of dance and technology. Presenting ideas of how to navigate and create hardware that has not been designed for all bodies, centering care and emotional impact. This presentation will be part performative and part discussion.

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Exploring the Captured Body in Maquette
Lisa Jamhoury

Maquette is a live, interactive performance inspired by Norma—a 1940s statue created by gynecologist Robert Dickinson using averaged measurements from 15,000 white women aged 21-25—and the dissemination of her “model body” through media, medicine, and a perfect body competition. In a creative exploration of Norma’s story, and the parallel histories of averaging and idealism in art, technology, and society, Maquette depicts the struggle of the fleshy human wishing to thrive in an increasingly “averaged,” virtual existence. Maquette is centered on a contemporary circus duet performed by Hybrid Movement Company, which marries ballet, circus, martial arts, yoga asana, and b-boying to create a unique movement style. The duet unfolds in both physical and virtual space simultaneously. As the live audience watches the performance in the physical room, the performers’ movements are tracked via a motion capture system. The movements are manipulated with averaging, then used to animate a statue in a virtual world projected into the studio. While captivating audiences with a novel hybrid virtual/physical choreography, Maquette provokes critical questions about the use of averaging in design and computation, which has proven time and again to make false, often detrimental, assumptions about individuals, especially regarding neurodiversity, disability, race, and gender. Ultimately, by engaging with the very technologies that build the “Metaverse,” Maquette challenges its audiences to consider what part of our humanly individuality is lost or gained at the threshold between physical and virtual worlds.

At “Dance and/as Technology” Lisa will present excerpts from Maquette alongside reflection on themes considered while producing the work. The 30-minute presentation will be followed with 30-minutes of conversation. Discussion themes will include: breaking away from the biped form in motion capture tracking and 3D design; the loving act of building bespoke software with performers’ small data; and considering the choreographic relationship between physical performers and their virtual counterparts and environments. 

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Experiencing Deepfake Dance
Pamela Krayenbuhl

Deepfakes have been circulating online for just over six years now. These synthetic moving images tend to replace one human’s face with another’s, or extrapolate a fake moving body from a photograph or photographs of someone. Dance has become a common test or limit case for the artificial neural networks that produce deepfakes, likely because the general public sees it as the most complex type of emotive human movement. Since 2019, researchers have been able to fake dance with increasing accuracy, such that many viewers of deepfake dancers now experience “uncanny valley” effects, and some might even be fooled.

Drawing from existing work in film phenomenology, dance studies, and cognitive science, this talk attempts to begin theorizing the experience of deepfake dance, for both viewers and (fake) performers. Though we have been viewing mechanically recorded dance on screen for over a century now, we have always been able to assume that realistic moving images of dancers were indexes of real humans—so what changes when this fact is no longer certain? Additional animating questions include: Is the experience meaningfully distinct from that of other manipulations of recorded moving bodies, such as fast or slow motion, Photoshop-style editing, etc.? For fake-performers, what are the ramifications of the disconnect between the body we feel and the body we see? What are the affective and expressive capacities or limits of deepfake dance? Ultimately, this talk suggests that we might flip the script on deepfake dance: rather than dance as a limit test for deepfakes, maybe deepfakes are a limit test for dance.

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The AI-Mediated Posthuman: Becoming Other with Movement
Avital Meshi

In the posthuman condition, we are invited to leave behind the idea of the ‘Human’. The humanistic discourse defines the ‘Human’ as a masculine, white, body-abled figure that fits within strict, perfect forms, thus serving as the standard for everything. We already know this understanding is flawed. Unlike the Human, the Posthuman is defined by its relationality and multiplicity. Rosi Braidotti describes it as embodied and embedded; it works across differences and is internally differentiated while being grounded and accountable; the Posthuman is also nomadic and contemporary, it rejects individualism and rests on the ethics of becoming. My research examines the concept of becoming-other through the lens of artificial intelligence algorithms. I spend time with a detection algorithm and allow it to observe my own body. While simply standing in front of it, the algorithm detects me as a ‘Person’. However, as I dance in front of it, a whole range of multiple other beings appear. With movement, the algorithm recognizes me as a dog, a cat, a horse, a bird, a chair, a table, a sofa, a kite, an airplane, a vase, a surfboard, and even a refrigerator. Many would claim such detections are merely glitches that require technological fixing, but I would like to think of them as opportunities to imagine myself differently. If an AI algorithm, trained on thousands of images of cats, sees a cat in me, can I see it too? Can I practice and distill the movement so that the algorithm will always recognize me as a cat? During the presentation of my piece, participants will have the opportunity to spend time interacting with the AI algorithm, move in front of it, and imagine their own unique becoming. 

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Field of View: Performance Capture
Freya Olafson

This presentation addresses Olafson’s MÆ-Motion Aftereffect performance series which explores the impact of emergent consumer technologies associated with XR – Extended Reality and the mediation of movement through performance capture technology. The works in the MÆ series are digital collages of motion-capture data (both open source and uniquely generated); ready-made and custom 3D models; and varied internet-sourced monologues that recount bodily experiences of VR in live gameplay and VR pornography, as well as out-of-body experiences, astral projection, and psychedelic drug explorations. These intentionally diverse monologues situate virtual technology alongside other methods of expanding individual perceptions of reality, time, and space. Olafson’s investigation of performance capture is situated in a lineage of augmented performance art, including the Bauhaus (Oskar Schlemmer 1888–1943), the Fluxus Movement (Al Hansen’s 1966 “Lettuce Manifesto”); Brody Condon’s video game work Adam Killer (1999); and Manifest.AR’s “Manifesto for Augmented Reality Art”’ (2011). These manifestos, texts, and artworks offer insight into the digital replication, transference, and translation of human movement to screen(s).

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Towards an Aesthetics of Touch: Digital Media Design, Movement, and Audio-Driven Tactile Feedback
Jessica Rajko

Despite its use in personal technology, digitally mediated touch (haptics) is rarely explored for its potential within dance performance contexts. Drawing on creative practice research within somatics and dance, this workshop will facilitated exploration of audio-driven haptic technologies and designs. Considering how haptic design impacts our day-to-day experiences of touch, we will delve into the growing significance of tactility and touch in digital media design. Imagining possibilities for mediated touch in live performance contexts, much of the workshop’s examples will come from haptic designs for interactive installations and live dance performance. Participants will have the opportunity to explore audio-driven tactile transducers prepared to receive and process prerecorded and live audio signals in real-time using Max/MSP. The workshop will follow the following format: First, I will share my creative process and past work, which will support a discussion of touch-based consent, acknowledgement of artistic contributors, and living community guidelines. Second, I will offer participants the opportunity to explore prefabricated audio/tactile scenarios designed to build a shared experience of mediated touch. Lastly, participants will get to design their own interactions by remixing my personal setup or imagining speculative designs. Together, we will explore the rich potential for first-person felt experiences and dance-based embodied knowledge to cultivate intrinsic connections between movement, touch, and performative exchange between dancers, designers, and audiences.

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Extending Bodies: Using AI and Dance to Create Story
Sandra Rodriguez & Alexander Whitley

Artificial Intelligence and game engines have increasingly been used to shape tools that enable better management of motion capture data, track users’ motions, or seamlessly weave this information to adapt avatars postures in video games. What if we applied these tools to dance? What if we used AI to elongate the sense of body, of movement, in story? Future Rites is a multi-user, collaborative VR dance experience, based on Stravinsky’s seminal ballet The Rite Of Spring. By combining AI and motion matching, we create a unique system that helps us extend a user’s ordinary gestures to the world and make it match music, dance and story. As users interact with the VR world and characters they become dancers – shaping the outcome of a narrative based on an inevitable sacrifice. This presentation will reflects on the importance of inviting movement and dance as means to craft story – not just support it.

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Clock, Fall: Choreorobotics and Near Futures of Choreographic Practice
Sydney Skybetter

In this excerpt from Clock, Fall, Sydney Skybetter will discuss some of the foundational issues in choreorobotic practice, and gesture to emerging modes of creative and parasitical resistance. 

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Roundtable
Site as Creation: Between Technology and Somatic Bodies

Caroline Laurin-Beaucage (Organizer)

How do dancers engage with non-human entities? How can this collaboration and relationship evolve to generate meaning and facilitate the emergence of dramaturgy? How do the methods of dance engage in dialogue with the methods of technology, and what strategies are employed in this interaction by researchers, creators, and dancers?

Building upon the exploration of dancer’s engagement with non-human entities, Caroline Laurin-Beaucage invites two creative teams to present their research creation projects: Diorama and Popmolle. The idea is to analyze and draw attention to a framework rooted in flat ontology, highlighting the merging of human and non-human realms within its creative sphere and overarching structure. Embracing the concept of new media dramaturgy (NMD) as proposed by Eckersall, Grehan and Sheer (2017), these two projects have generated scenographic spaces that recognize an agency operating through collaborations between artists and objects. Additionally, a somatic approach seems to have emerged as an important methodology, fostering an embodiment that seamlessly integrates gestures in relation to both humans and non-humans. This holistic approach culminates in a qualitative state of presence that resonates as a unified whole, enriching the creative process.

Diorama: Stratégies performatives pour un dispositif modulable // Performative strategies for a modular device

Audrey Rochette, chorégraphe et directrice artistique // choreographer and artistic director 
Alice Sanz, artiste médiatique et directrice technique // media artist and technical director

Popmolle: co-création entre danse et arts numériques // co-creation between dance and digital arts

Liliane Moussa, co-créatrice, chorégraphie et interprétation // co-creator, choreography, and performance
Danny Perreault, co-créateur, conception lumières et projections // co-creator, lights and projections conception

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Roundtable
Regroupement Québécois de la Danse 

Armando Menicacci  (musicologue et spécialiste de la danse)
Denis Poulin (Professeur associé, UQAM)
Audrey Gaussiran (chorégraphe / interprète )
Line Nault (artiste interdisciplinaire / chorégraphe / interprète)
Samuel Tétreault (Cofondateur et Directeur artistique, Les 7 Doigts)

Re-voir, re-traverser, re-fonder: comment la technologie nous donne l’occasion de questionner et transformer les pratiques artistiques scéniques

Le numérique est une expression humaine prenant forme machinique. Or, si l’on peut définir le miel comme un artefact créé par des êtres intelligents, organisés en sociétés complexes, qui vont chercher des matières premières autour d’eux·elles et les combinent selon un savoir-faire qui les est propre, on pourrait émettre l’hypothèse que la technologie est aussi naturelle et humaine. En appliquant cette description au numérique, si l’on prend l’exemple d’un ordinateur, on pourrait dire que c’est, lui aussi, l’ordinateur est un artefact créé par des êtres intelligents, organisés en sociétés complexes, qui vont chercher des matières autour d’eux·elles et les combinent selon un savoir-faire qui leur est propre. Par conséquent, si on creuse cette hypothèse, on pourrait se poser la question de la manière dont les dispositifs numériques, en tant qu’hyperhumains, nous aident ou empêchent – au demeurant – de continuer à évoluer artistiquement et scientifiquement, en tant qu’humains, autant au niveau esthétique que politique ou encore écologique ?