24 January 2025
10:00am - 4:00pm
Join us for a networking and discussion symposium focusing on the exploration of performance technology and practice.
We are pleased to offer this symposium day to create a space for artists/practitioners/researchers to come together and discuss the constantly evolving landscape of contemporary performance and technology. Join us for a series of talks by leading practitioners in the field as they share their explorations into the intersection of the live body and digital systems.
Pell Ensemble
Pell Ensemble is led by choreographer Rebecca Evans creating genre-defying cross-disciplinary digital dance works for stage and beyond. With collaborators, Rebecca explores ways to appreciate our mutual dependency as part of a human, environmental and technological ecology to speculate on new futures and ways of being.
AΦE (AE)
Explore 'LILITH.AEON', AΦE's AI-enhanced XR dance odyssey. See cutting-edge tech and raw emotion fuse as we probe life, death, and immortality through AI-generated choreography. Inspired by the youngest cryogenically frozen person, we use Motion Capture, Machine Learning, and Unreal Engine to redefine immersive storytelling. Learn about our creative process and how to integrate these technologies into immersive productions. Delivered performatively, this session reveals the secrets of merging art and tech, electrifying audiences with the future of performance art!
Katie Dale-Everett Dance
We focus on creating positive impact through projects that inspire change, big and small, in individuals, groups and communities. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we support people to improve their mental and physical wellbeing through dance, verbatim theatre and emergent technologies, such as motion capture and VR.
Led by Artistic Director, Katie Dale-Everett, we collaboratively work with real people and their experiences to investigate how we can use the arts to develop their wellbeing and sense of community.
Dr Boyd Branch
This lecture-workshop explores how Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques can be reimagined for the digital age, engaging with the artificial and digital bodies that permeate our lives. Dr Boyd Branch will present two case studies from his Digital Theatre of the Oppressed (DTO), demonstrating how theatre artists can engage with technologies such as smartphones, motion capture, game engines, and virtual reality to reveal hidden systems of control. Participants will explore how these tools can be transformed into platforms for restoring agency, creativity, and complexity to individuals and communities. Through play, interaction, and transformation, the workshop illuminates how both the opportunities and coercions of technology can be placed in dialectical form for meaningful engagement and collective empowerment.
Programme
- 09.30 – Arrive and Welcome – Anselm Studio 1
- 10.00 - Introduction: Dr Andy Hurst, Nina Atkinson, James Middleton
- 10.30 – Dr Boyd Branch (Coventry University)
- 11.15 – Aoi Nakamura, Esteban Lecoq (AΦE): AI Immersive Storytelling: LILITH.AEON lecture Performance
- 12.00 – Katie Dale-Everett (KDE Dance): Playscape: How to Build a Galaxy
- 12.45 - Lunch
- 13.30 – Rebecca Evans (Pell Ensemble): Embodied Practitioners and the Development of Future Spaces
- 14.15 - Break
- 14.30 – KDE Dance Performance: Playscape: How to Build a Galaxy followed by ‘have a go’ workshop places (limited slots)
- 15.15 – Round table discussion
- 16.00 – Networking opportunity and chance to watch James Middleton workshop
