From the Director

The point of departure of my choreography is a query about the body and the abstraction of embodiment. How does Dance x Technology describe the relationship between humans and virtual species?

Dimensional perspectives and indirect interactions collide, reflecting an exploration of virtual dance. Players use their bodies to experience setbacks, revelations and challenges through different devices in three uncertain dimensions. They encounter different avatars and identities.

When people interact with objects in the network, can sensors, generating resistance, test this acceleration? Can dimensional avatars exist in the space between virtual reality and physical reality, collect and analyse clues? Can human senses be reprogrammed to adjust the intensity of concentration within the crossover of technology and dance movement?

In dislocated time and space, the creative team and I questioned the conventional subjectivity of media, and tried to create new physical and mental experiences.

Sometimes, we forget to observe what’s new in space. Barriers are all around us and we need to break through. When you find the data source, when you try to solve the dilemma, you become the medium, and the flow becomes the driving force. As the physical and virtual separate and merge in space, we experiment with the body until we have a group dance that goes beyond the individual and the imagination into unknown territory.

Zelia ZZ Tan

Accelerating Dimension

-Reconsidering Movement through Physical and Virtual Dimensions

The audience will be invited into this dimension, to step between the player-dancers in physical movement and the virtual world. Is the avatar you or he or she or it? Who is in control? Who is being watched? Who is watching? Do the audience, dancers, physical bodies or avatars have the power?

Players control their avatars with sensors, enter the virtual world and encounter familiar scenes – wetlands and buildings. The virtual and physical spaces overlap, the audience, players and avatars cooperate or resist each other in the environments. Giant bone avatars, lizard avatars, small cells, plants, stone formations; the audience, players, avatars; everyone is affected – captured, unlocked, assimilated and taken over, bodies melt and spin faster. The avatars possess the dancers’ consciousness, generating new energy.

Choreographer Zelia ZZ Tan has created an alternative view of the dancing body in this exploration. The loops, generated by movements in the dimensional world, cause time and space to dislocate, blurring the boundaries between media and impacting our reality. The body exists in both reality and the virtual world, and is continuously being experimented on. Sensors build a network that connects the body so that it can enjoy and explore the virtual world, redefining the body in time and space and breaking through the traditional logic of choreography. Technology opens up our imagination about existence, so that together we can build a journey of the body's perception in the interplay between the virtual and the real.