I was so honoured to be a recipient of the Ivor Guest Research Grant from the Society for Dance Research grant in 2022. It allowed me to do some pilot choreographic studies at the Immersion Lab. MIT towards the Space+Dance+Digital (S+D2) Augmented Reality (AR) project that is in development.
I talked about this project in IMMERSED IN: contemporary dance in September 2022.
I have been asking – What does it mean artistically and politically for dance to take advantage of the boundary between physical and digital space?
In the Immersion Lab, I have been tracking movement in space without capturing the dancer’s body shape. This creates an artwork of ‘movement’ without many of the social and political constructs that seeing the body that is producing the movement would impose on the meaning of the movement. This work also allows the AR audience member to step into the movement, be present in and contribute to the choreography. This research explores collaborative place-making and new ways of artistic and political togetherness through the digital and the dance space.
The Society for Dance research writes: ‘S+D2 is a dance project creating choreography accessed through the immersive digital platform of AR. AR allows the performance experience to be shared and responded to by people digitally coming together across geographic, political, language and social barriers. Part of the research impetus is to ask what does it mean artistically for dance to take advantage of the physical boundary crossing of digital space? The project develops preliminary research by Akinleye and Preciado-Azanza’