Dance and Technology – New Stages for Mediated Bodies

As technology has become part of the modern way of life, it has naturally entered the realm of art and performance. Various technological developments have changed the practices of performance and diversified the dialogue between arts disciplines. In dance, performing arts and live art, video cameras and lighter projectors spawned new fusions of media and performance as early as the 1960s. Examples include choreographer Trisha Brown and media artist Robert Whitman, who experimentally combined dance and moving image in their 1966 work Homemade, in which a projected moving image is moved on stage by the dancer harnessed with a projector on her back.[1]

Advanced technology has enabled real-time video images and projections of and from a moving body, and has rapidly brought new compositional possibilities into contemporary art. Today, artists are integrating new post-internet digital technologies into performance art for a variety of purposes. The role of technology in artistic work is often multifaceted, ranging from a tool that assists the body or the perceptual process to an equal expressive element, constituting essential aesthetics and dramaturgy.

In this article, I focus on the practices and artworks enabled by interactive technologies from the perspective of dance. This excludes other domains of art involving new technologies, such as sound and media art or gamified and immersive performances, which often include embodied elements. Many dance games and social interaction platforms incorporate varying degrees of gestural expression and movement-based interaction, and their influence on the development of the technologies is evident. However, the aim of this text is to shed light on how the body is influenced by technologies and (rather than describing the tools and their operating systems), to show how dance and choreography relate to the technologies.

Technological Attitudes

The reasons for using technological tools in dance and performance can be many, but often the essence is to explore an altered body relationship through interactive environments and physical or simulation-induced perceptions. Technology can subvert the sensory system, revealing new perspectives on embodied spaces of experience and bringing to the surface phenomena that are experientially novel or hidden. Through technological interaction, our bodies are in a constant state of flux, creating new kinds of sensory connections with the environment and thus shaping our perception of ourselves – changing our understanding and relationship to performing, choreography and audiences.

Technology – Tool or Dialogue?

One way to approach working with technology is from a utilitarian perspective – thinking of technology as a tool. An instrumental approach considers the functional and sensory potentials and limitations of technology, and how these tools can be utilised in artistic processes. Art can contribute to the development of technology and foster technological innovation by looking at it in new ways, often outside the laws of the market economy. This category includes a number of new instruments for musical expression (NIME), which exploit new technologies such as motion control.[2]

To explore this approach, we can see how these tools are used in dance. In the body-based practice of dance, the modalities (modes and qualities) of technological interaction are based on either control or dialogue. In a control-based approach, the technology is conceived as a tool used to enable interaction, to measure and compute movement using parameters that are purely for the purpose of controlling the device. For example, in dancer Aurie Hsu and music technologist Steven Kemper’s RAKS system, the technological tool, a wearable vest with multiple accelerometers and inclination sensors, is designed to produce music from the movement vocabulary and gestures of Middle Eastern belly dance.[3] The dancer produces selected musical elements through precisely articulated movements of the hips and torso, expanding the dancer’s role from movement expression to musical expression. The artistic framework of the project is the dance-induced music, where the functionalities of the movement-controlled instrument are derived from the gestures of the contemporary belly dance.

In a dialogic approach, the design of the data computation system emphasises the qualities of interaction and it aims at rich and undefined outcomes. Here, the aim is not so much to control as to achieve a mutual exchange of agents, which manifests itself experientially as a dialogical process. An example of the many projects that take this approach is WhoLoDance, a technological innovation and development research project on interactive technologies for dance learning by several European technology and arts institutes, focused on developing data-driven tools and interfaces for use in dance education.[4]

Choreomorphy, an interactive system developed during the WhoLoDance project, creates semi-abstract movement visualisation from full-body motion capture (mocap) in real time. The aim is to influence the dancer’s movement improvisation through various self-representations. The project reported that interacting with the digital counterpart enabled by the interface successfully expanded the test subject’s movement expression. However, the accessibility of high-end equipment is often a limitation to its practical use in dance education.[5]

These two projects clearly have different objectives of interaction. The RAKS system is based on controlling musical expression through a strictly defined movement language, while in Choreomorphy, interactivity aims at dialogue and the dancer seeks to be affected by the visual phenomena and thus to expand their movement expression. Many dance and technology projects try to strike a balance between the control and dialogue approaches to interaction design, considering both the artistic goals and the modalities of interaction offered by the technology. It is therefore essential to assess the system “entry fee”, i.e. the time spent learning to control the device and the properties it offers, such as the range, quality and freedom of expression.

Human and Technology as Entangled Allies

The relationship between body and technology can be viewed more radically as interdependent perceptual systems, entangled agencies or interacting alliances. In entanglement, the body and technology are seen as a shared ecosystem, where the sensorimotor and cognitive systems of the human body, the “living machine” and the “computed machine” meet and ally in a fruitful intertwining. Together, bodies and technology create an ecosystem in which both parties are in a processual state of becoming, reorganising themselves based on perceptual processes. This approach explores how technology activates and generates new multimodal sensations, perceptions and interpretations of both the body and its relationship with the technologically tuned environment.

Thus, in entangled allied thinking, work at the interfaces of art and technology requires simultaneously addressing issues of perception, presence, cognition, immersion, perspective, subjectivity and embodied lived experience. Technology can be understood as an activator of emerging corporeal potentialities and technological art as the foreground of the emergence of new performative behaviours.[6] In this context, the performative behaviour encloses the agential properties of the device with the modes of expression it enables, and possible interpretations that these affordances may hold for both the artists and the spectators.

The User’s Roles and Agency

In using technology for performing arts, the definition of the user’s agency is an essential part of interface design. The interactive affordances of a technological device, the agential frame, include the power relations between the device and the person interacting with it. The interactor can be a user, who controls predetermined functions enabled by the device fully or semi-autonomously (control); or an appropriator, openly using the device as they choose (dialogue); or an actor, whose agency is built into the logic of the system (alliance). The more control and autonomous agency the system provides, the more attention must be paid to the potential technologically tuned actions and the resulting performance behaviour as the totality of the choreography.

Another key aspect of the technology from a choreographic point of view is space: the multidimensional spatiality it offers, the performer’s relation to the space and ways of positioning the viewer(s). When digital technologies are used the experienced space and environment is no longer only the physical performance space with its constructed world, but it can be anything on a spectrum between entirely physical and entirely virtual, as a conceptually extended imaginary scopes to ways of experiencing the space, bodies and matter. Three-dimensional space expands into a fourth dimension as new imaginary digital spaces and spatial horizons extend beyond the physical and expand the embodied experienced space with virtual affordances. Technology offers ways to create a variety of overlapping and imposed physical and digital spaces; the virtual space can be embedded in, added onto or interlaced in combinations with the physical space.

When virtual reality (VR) enables a full range of movement and a variety of interactions, it can be an open playground of imaginary and potential environments. The subject may be totally immersed in the experienced space and surrenders to the virtual world and the psychophysical states it offers, in which the laws of the real world are altered. With augmented reality (AR) display and projection technologies, one can create new virtual layers and levels of meaning in the real world.[7] Our built-in predisposition to immerse ourselves in experience and the capacity of the sensory system to adapt to the environment offers the potential for emotionally powerful experiences, and thus interesting multidimensional stages for artists.

Approaching Technology through the Art of Dance

Several technological art projects navigate multiple, intersecting and overlapping artistic and technological imperatives and objectives. Off-the-shelf, accessible technologies are rarely designed for the arts, and their use in art projects often requires either the combination and adaptation of multiple tools, software and operating systems or the development of an entirely new system. The expressive and performative potential of new technologies are complex. It takes time to perceive and recognise the bodily, perceptual and agential conditions of the performer or experiencer and to consider the composition of the final outcome. Projects require a variety of resources, specific skills and sometimes purpose-built performance and distribution platforms. Many dance and technology projects are to some extent research projects, often situated at the intersection of technological, scientific and artistic research.

Despite her background as a visual artist, Canadian Char Davies(born 1954) is a pioneer of body-based virtual art. Her works Osmose (1995) and Éphémère (1999), realised in virtually experienced environments, approached embodied subjectivity in a pioneering way. Both works are single-user experiences through a VR device and both focus on conveying an immersive multisensory embodied experience. Her work is well illustrated by the fact that instead of an experiencer, player or viewer, the artist speaks of an immersant. For its time, her approach was both technically and aesthetically revolutionary. Davies’ works have become even more significant over time due to their technical and experiential pioneering. The visual world of the works is porous and derived from nature, but escapes strict representationalism and they are experienced through mediated bodily interaction. The immersant navigates the works’ translucent visual worlds, through a sensory vest that recognises breath and balance. The body submerges into the softly gliding worlds and trust in the work is established through a somatically sensed body resulting in a transformative mental state. Being in the world replaces the need to control or fully comprehend it; the internal bodily stimuli and the external stimuli of the artwork osmotically dissolve into each other, entangled in the functions of the body. Osmosis has been widely exhibited in art galleries and museums even in the 2010s, with several published reviews and essays. Immersants in the artwork have described their experience as transcendental, translucid and healing; in it, through embodied, associative interpretations, consciousness is transformed.[8]

The work of media and dance artist Ruth Gibson, with her partner Bruno Martelli,also configurates physical and digital spaces to explore bodily practices. In her dissertation, Falling Upwards, Gibson outlines her diverse work with technologies and analyses several of her artistic works that stem from her practice with the Skinner Release dance improvisation technique (SRT).[9] At the heart of Gibson’s work is the practice of kinaesthetic thinking, encompassing the standpoints of performer, choreographer and audience. She highlights the parallel between the imaginative practices common in dance and virtual simulations and exploits this in her artistic concepts.

In the multifaceted MAN A project, viewers of interactive AR and VR installations create a bodily relationship with space, time and matter through a technological device. In the artistic outputs of the MAN A project, dance is realised both as visual and auditory phenomena unfolding in the installation and in the body of the viewer as they experience the work. Although SRT dance practice is the framework of Gibson’s choreographic thinking and plays a vital role in the compositional processes, at the heart of artworks is the interplay of the mediated material with the audience and the movement within the viewers themselves. As an artist, Gibson’s investigative approach to technology explores the performative activity that permeates the whole process and the sensitised potentials that unfold in the body’s field of experience.[10]

Throughout his distinguished career, Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin (born 1964) has used technologies in his artistic processes, both as a choreographic tool and for conceptualisation. Mocap technology was a key impetus for Jobin to move from the stage to virtual environments. Jobin sees virtual, even remote modes of performing arts as a major contribution to the future of contemporary dance.[11]

Jobin’s VR_I is a multi-player extended reality artwork that uses real-time marker-based optical mocap technology to capture audiences’ activities.[12] In VR_I, five viewers are equipped with VR gear and computer backpacks, headsets, microphones and optical mocap markers. The equipment they wear allows them to appear and operate in real time as avatars in a fully virtual environment. During the performance, the real space and the virtual world are juxtaposed as experiencers see each other and themselves behaving in the 3D virtual scenery according to how they move and act in the performance space. Participants’ actions are represented in real time in the virtual avatar bodies given to them, which they experience from a first-person perspective. In the virtual simulation, the participants are connected to each other through bodily and verbal communication, but the connection to their own bodies and real space remains strong.

Jobin uses familiar theatrical techniques in scenes where virtual dancers perform in surroundings and worlds that play with scale and perspective. The group of audience members is thrown into the virtual world, encountering the unfolding scenes as a team of explorers. The avatar character assigned to each participant is revealed through communication with others as they inhabit the characters in the first person. The artwork is a playful game of embodied agency and identity.[13]

In his recent work, Comédie Virtuelle,[14] Jobin takes real-time virtual dance to the next level by bringing performers dancing remotely in three different mocap studio locations (and countries) onto the virtually experienced digital stage. In Comédie Virtuelle the audience was also in VR, moving freely in the digital space, viewing the live, yet digital, performance on a specially built virtual platform. Jobin has developed this live–remote performance scheme for several years, taking his digital performance, Cosmogony, to several countries around the world. The company performs the piece from their home mocap studio in Geneva and it is presented live in the hosting venue. Cosmogony takes advantage of new digital technologies while honouring live dance; although the artists and the audience are in different locations they share the same temporal dimension.[15]

Canadian artist and researcher Isabelle Choinière(born 1963) works at the interface of dance and technology by using it to articulate somatic, lived body phenomena. In her creative research process, she explores how the body reveals its operational self to itself when in contact with live interactive technology. She constructs theatrical conditions in which technology affects the performer’s sense of movement by subverting sensory perceptions. She aims to de-hierarchise the senses by reducing the weight of the visual sense and provoking somatic, intra-body sensations, thus opening up space for alternative performative behaviours.[16]

The artist describes her work, The Collective Body, through three interwoven circular zones in which the elements of the piece – the improvising performers, the audience and the interactively generated soundscape – are positioned. The movement expression based on the contact and touch of the five dancers (inner circle), the soundscape created from and by the dancers yet filtered through the technology (outer circle) and the affinity of the spectators (middle circle) create a hyper-intimate, tactile and auditory experience. In this piece, the “collective physical body” of the dancers and the “sound-body” formed in real time create an intertwined, interdependent and constantly evolving fabric of phenomena and perceptions that exists and moves as a porous entity. In her choreography, Choinière emphasises cultivating the performers’ perception and reorganising the sensory body mediated by technology.[17]

Entanglement of Body and Technology

The interactivity provided by these technologies leads to self-generating processes of co-creation or intra-actions. With digital technology, we witness emerging metaphysical materiality, in which matter, space and time are treated and perceived radically differently, and in which object-subject relations are blurred in a layered way. A phenomenon experienced through virtual technology is fully digital but still affects us on a functional, emotional and psychological level. The time, place and matter of the digitally produced phenomenon we encounter are immaterial, but the phenomenon is actualised through our lived experience into a psychophysical experience that moves and touches us. We move, perceive, feel, are affected and transformed, think and understand under the influence of both internal and external sensory stimuli. Philosopher and physicist Karen Barad articulates this operative entanglement of material and non-material, human and non-human entities through the concept of intra-activity.[18]

Barad defines intra-action as co-constitution or ontological entanglement of entities. She offers an alternative to the concept of interaction, which is based on the idea of unbound, interacting entities or objects, in a kind of chain of reactions. Intra-activity, instead, means that the primary ontological entities are not separate, distinct independent objects, but material-discursive phenomena that only become entities through “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies.”[19] The contemplation of intra-actions is a study of agential interconnectedness. In the context of technological and bodily encounters, the agents are intertwined and their inherent boundaries and properties are in a constant state of flux, i.e. intra-action. Intra-activity is one way of considering the alliance between body and technology in terms of being. Essential here is the mutually influenced fluidity of ecosystems in a state of perceptual flux and becoming.[20]

Barad’s agential realism is actualised in mediated performance environments. There, layered and intertwined intra-activity creates ever new phenomena in which the affectivity of agency is multiplied and complexified in nearly infinite variety. Following Barad’s concept of agency, moving human bodies and technologies that generate visualisations are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties, but phenomena that acquire certain boundaries and properties in an open dynamic intra-action. Metaphysically, one does not exist without the other and objects exist only in their interwoven dimension.[21]

When considering the moving body and dance in technology, however, we cannot overlook the primacy of the body as a conveyor of experience. In intra-action, lived bodily experiences unfold and can be explored and encountered in a novel way. Therefore, to understand the nature of experience and to develop artistic concepts requires an experience-oriented approach. It is therefore useful to consider the nature of intra-active entanglement and embodied experience in the context of the choreographic praxis.

Choreography of the Mediated Body

In a technology-driven environment, we explore new forms and dimensions of performativity, where participants – be they performers or spectators – with technological systems, are the mediators and enablers of the art experience. When we, as embodied beings, come into contact with digital technology and incorporate its affordances, a new extended performative corporeality emerges, in which the body, with all its abilities, not only influences digital phenomena but is also affected by and incorporates it. Interactivity through technology creates a realm in which intra-activity emerges.

The intra-active environments of technological devices and bodies offer new stages in which the body is present as an actor, both experientially and functionally. New media enable creators to articulate aesthetics from an embodied perspective, to consider the digital platform as a stage or scenography, and to create dramaturgy that explores the interplay between bodies and devices and the complex connotations that emerge from their relationship. An artwork is no longer composed of a series of discrete elements that are brought together, but rather an interactive “ecology of time-space” that manipulates, blurs and transforms the boundaries of perceived elements, including the body and movement language of the dancer as it is mediated through the technology.

This generates new possibilities for choreographic thinking. The relationship between body and apparatus, along with presence, agency, the inner bodily perception and its relation to the digitised representation and the actual or imaginary stimuli it generates, is brought to the surface. On these digital stages, questions of performance, agency and choreography are morphed and layered. They operate at the interfaces of real and imagined stimulus, private and shared, where choreographic and embodied thinking permeates the whole process – both physical and technological.

An artist working with technology has to embrace it, understand its laws and functionalities in order to think and create art intertwined with it. Choreographing this new context requires a willingness to discover new performative modes and the ability to articulate them to others in the process, as well as a sensitive ear to attune to the perceptions of others. Fine-tuning the technological apparatus and the interwoven choreography is usually a collaborative effort between all those involved. Sensitive, perceptive dialogue and intersectionality are therefore central to artistic processes of working with technology, to which art and technology practitioners bring their own unique insights.[22]

Skill with digital tools is an important part of the practice, but in the process of making art, technology must be accepted as a distinct phenomenon, as a constantly evolving mode of agency. Ruth Gibson writes about contingency in the encounter between technology and the body, and how in a creative process it is essential to remain open to the unknown and unpredictable.[23] In the entangled interplay of the two complex systems of body and machine, new corporeality, dramaturgy and aesthetics emerge in which to envision, experience and enable a new form of embodied digital choreography.

Mediatised art can position the audience and spectator in a new agential relationship with the artwork. This requires ethical reflection on the role of the spectator and the performance situation, and the ability to critically examine the power structures of both.[24] The author considers whether the viewer is given the authority to influence the performers, their experience or that of others, or even the progression of the work. Encountering and openly expressing a new kind of embodied agency can be unsettling and make spectators and performers feel exposed in the midst of new, otherworldly, unpredictable experiences. Defining the degree of control, agency, singularity or co-creativeness is a matter of choreographing the whole experience.[25] It is worth bearing these issues in mind when working at the interface of participatory spectatorship and new technology-based performance art.

The pragmatic contact between body and technology brings to light and stages the invisible internal bodily connections and evokes dormant perceptual layers. It provokes an internal reorganisation of the experiential body that both constructs a new bodily logic and transforms the lived bodily relationship to the self, the environment and technology. At the same time, it shifts and challenges the fabric of performance and performing. New media can place the bodies of both performers and viewers in a radically new perceptual field, allowing nuanced experiential horizons between internal and external sensory stimuli, and create real or imaginary, yet intensely perceived, interfaces at the intersection of performer, audience and technology.

Notes

1 Homemade 29.3.1966. Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY; Dixon, Trisha Brown – Homemade 20.3.2012.

2 NIME, an acronym for New Interfaces for Musical Expression, refers to a 2002 research conference on the development of new technologies and their role in musical expression and artistic performance. The term has since become established in the industry to refer to technological tools developed to produce, manipulate and manage music and sound. NIME covers a wide range of instruments and operating systems, one of which is motion and gesture-controlled instruments.

3 RAKS stands for Remote electroA- coustic Kinesthetic Sensing (RAKS) system, a wireless sensor interface designed for belly dance movement, Hsu et al. 2015.

4 Rizzo et al. 2018

5 El Raheb et al. 2018

6 In this context performative behaviour must be interpreted broadly to include all performance activities and the agents involved in it. It does not refer to representational or narrative construction of performance elements, but to a way of viewing and composing the new circumstances.

7 Virtual technologies are defined by the type of display and level of immersion. Augmented Reality (AR) augments the real world with simulations of information and sensations on an external display. A virtual reality (VR) user wears a headset and is surrounded by an artificial, virtual environment, in which devices emit images, sound or other sensations that stimulate the senses and simulate physical existence. Mixed reality (MR) is a generic term for a combination of AR, VR and physical reality. As VR/AR hardware has become more widely used, extended reality (XR) has become the generic term. For a fairly comprehensive information package on the history, vocabulary, equipment and uses of virtual technology see Filmora: https://filmora.wondershare.com/virtual-reality/.

8 Davies 2004., Char Davies, Immersense website http://www.immersence.com.

9 A dance improvisation technique developed by the American Joan Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s. Skinner Releasing Dance Technique, abbreviated SRT. Gibson 2019.

10 Gibson 2019, 23, 199–223.

11 Jobin 24.9.2020.

12 Full-body motion can be captured using a variety of technologies to locate multiple individual points in three-dimensional space. These systems generally fall into three main categories: optical, magnetic and electromechanical. Currently, the most popular method is optical motion capture with markers, in which a camera detects the movement of markers placed on the body, i.e. points that reflect or emit light in space, and uses this to build a skeleton of a figure simulating the human body. Markerless optical systems use a three-dimensional depth image in the same way as sonar. Magnetic systems detect the position of markers in the magnetic field, while electromechanical systems are based on estimating the change in position between points.

13 VR_I, premiering in Canada on 6 October 2017. The work was screened in Finland at the Loikka dance film festival VR programme in April 2018.

14 La Comédie Virtuelle, premiere 31.8.2020; Jobin 24.9.2020.

15 About Cosmogony see the artist’s website: https://www.gillesjobin.com/en/creation/virtual-crossings-buenos-aires-geneva/ ja  https://www.gillesjobin.com/en/news-en/cosmogony-may-june-23-tourwithouttraveling/.

16 Choinière et al. 2020, 66–70, 71–79.

17 Choinière 1.10.2020.

18 Barad 2007, 33 and 139.

19 Barad 2007, 33.

20 An example of intra-action: in digital art’s mocap visualisation, a moving image is generated and processed through digital devices to produce an autonomous representation of movement. Thus, a motion-based visualisation, computed according to its own algorithm, creates a non-human digital entity, but in its agency, it is entangled both with its own digital essence and with its operational counterpart, the human agent.

21 Barad 2007, 172

22 The ecology of technological apparatus and technologically enhanced performance has been deconstructed through the ARCAA model – an acronym for “actor, role, context, activity and artefact.” The aims of this model is to articulate the roles and activities of actors in the context of designing new artefacts and technological systems for performances. Masu et al. 2019, Masu et al. 2020.

23 Gibson 2019, 192.

24 In Osmosis and VR_I, the viewers take an active role. In a virtually experienced work of art, the viewer often takes on the role of a virtual subject, thus influencing the course of the work or at the very least determining the direction of the gaze. For example, in Skeleton Conductor XR Art (2020), a virtual work created by the author, the viewer activates the audiovisual world of the work with their movement and, through interaction, contributes to creating the work while experiencing it. The work can therefore be seen as a new fusion of performance art and digital media art, where the viewer becomes the performer.

25 Or otherwise called experience design in the HCI context

Literature

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke university Press.

Choinière, Isabelle & Pitozzi, Enrico & Davidson, Andrea. 2020. Through the Prism of the Senses: Mediation and New Realities of the Body in Contemporary Performance. Technology, Cognition and Emergent Research-Creation Methodologies. Intellect Books.

Davies, Char. 2004. “Virtual space.” In Space: In science, art and society. François Penz, Robert Howell, Gregory Radick, Neal Ascherson & John Barrow (eds.). Cambridge University Press, 69–104.

Gibson, Ruth. 2019. Falling Upwards – Somatic Sensing in Virtual Space. N.p.: RMIT University.

Hsu, Aurie & Kemper, Steven T.. 2015. “Kinesonic Composition as Choreographed Sound: Composing Gesture in Sensor-Based Music.” In ICMC.

Masu, Raul, Correia, Nuno N., Jurgens Stephan, Feitsch, Jochen & Romão, Teresa. 2020. “Designing interactive sonic artefacts for dance performance: an ecological approach.” In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Audio Mostly, 122–129.

Masu, Raul, Bettega, Mela, Correia, Nuno N., Romão, Teresa & Morreale, Fabio. 2019. “ARCAA: A Framework to Analyse the Artefact Ecology in Computer Music Performance”. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts.

Raheb, Katerina El, Tsampounaris, George, Katifori, Akrivi & Ioannidis, Yannis. 2018. “Choreomorphy: A whole-body interaction experience for dance improvisation and visual experimentation.” In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, 1–9.

Rizzo, Anna, Katerina El Raheb, Sarah Whatley, Rosa Maria Cisneros, Massimiliano Zanoni, Antonio Camurri, Vladimir Viro et al. 2018. “WhoLoDancE: Whole-body Interaction Learning for Dance Education.” In CIRA@ EuroMed, 41–50.

Artworks

Homemade. Trisha Brown ja Robert Whitman. Premiere at Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY, March 29.3.1966. New York,USA. https://trishabrowncompany.org/repertory/homemade.html.

MAN A series, choreographer Ruth Gibson and technology designer Bruno Martelli. MAN A VR, a spatialised virtual experience, a mobile app and a customised viewing device. Sound design by Adam Nash. Big Bob, Sculpture and virtual experience. 2015. Jazz and JackDaw site-specific wall prints and objects. 2014 and 2015. MAN A performers.

Osmosis and Ephémère, directed and conceived by Char Davies. Custom virtual software by John Harrison, computer graphics by Georges Mauro, sound design by Dorota Blaszczak, composition and sound programming by Rick Bidlack. Osmosis premiered at the Montréal Museum of Modern Art in 1995. Ephémère premiere at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 1998.

The Collective Body, Meat Paradox Phase 3 and Flesh waves phase 4&5, Artist-researcher Isabelle Choinière, in artistic research collaboration with Enrico Pitozzi and Fernanda D’Agostino. Artistic components of the research process 2007–2016. First performances of Meat Paradox Phase 3, France 2007, Flesh Waves 4, Quebec 2014 and Flesh Waves 5, USA 2016.

VR_I, Gilles Jobin and Artanim. Choreography by Gilles Jobin. Dancers Susana Panadés Diaz, Victoria Chiu, Diya Naidu, Gilles Jobin, Tidiani N’Diaye. Jean-Paul Lespagnard, Carla Scaletti / Symbolic Sound, Camilo De Martino, Tristan Siodlak, Camilo De Martino, Rémy Maetz, Hugo Cahn. Premiere Festival du Nouveau Cinéma – FNC Explore, Montréal – CANADA 6.10.2017. http://www.vr-i.space

Online Sources

Char Davies, Immersence website. http://www.immersence.com Accessed 14.11.2020.

Cie Gilles Jobin, choreographer Gilles Jobin. https://www.gillesjobin.com/en/digital/pieces/. Accessed 30.10.2020).

Filmora website. https://filmora.wondershare.com/virtual-reality/ Accessed 15.9.2020.

Isabelle Choiniére, choreographer-researcher website. http://www.isabellechoiniere.com/index.htm. / Accessed 15.10.2020.

New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference website. https://www.nime.org/ Accessed 10.11.2020.

Tim Dixon Trisha Brown – Homemade , Open file -blog, 20.3.2012. http://openfileblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/trisha-brown-homemade.html Accessed 17.11.2020.

VR_I, website of the work. http://www.vr-i.space Accessed 30.10.2020.

Interviews

Gilles Job online interview 24.9.2020. Interviewer Hanna Pajala-Assefa. Pajala-Assefa private archive.

Isabelle Choinière online interview 1.10.2020. Interviewer Hanna Pajala-Assefa. Pajala-Assefa private archive.