Digital Bodies + Virtual Spaces: exploring performance and digital world building

Friday 24 January, 2025
10:00 to 4:00 pm GMT
Canterbury Christ Church University
Anselm Studio 1, N Holmes Rd, Canterbury CT1 1NX (map)

We are pleased to join this symposium day 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.

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: How to Build a Galaxy
15.15 – Round table discussion
16.00 – Networking opportunity and chance to watch James Middleton workshop