Interactive dance collaboration

Early November 2024 I spent a week in Weimar, Germany together with choreographer and interactive dance pioneer Robert Wechsler Palindrome Dance Company, and dancer Camille Jackson and to make a new piece of interactive dance together. Robert and I have been working a lot together in later years with different artistic project, but in later years we had mostly been focusing on MotionComposer. This time, we wanted to start completely from scratch and develop something new. We were joined by fabulous dancer Camille Jackson from Texas, US, with background from Festspielhaus St.Pölten and Siciliano Contemporary Ballet. During the week we developed several ideas, which ended in a nine minute long performance with most of the music being generated from Jackson’s movements played over an eight channel sound system.

Camille Jackson performing in You say you love your children above all else, November 2024.

The title of the piece is taken from one of Greta Tunberg’s speeches addressed to the leaders of the world that don’t act despite of all the alarming signs that the climate is running wild. The association to one of the world’s clear, young counter voices, now being out of public media attention for some years came spontanously as a reaction to Trump winning the US elections - she seemed to us to stand for everything Trump was against (and later have started to silence). In the fearing uncertain times we felt Gretas voice was one that gave us hope, and in the piece it has a framing and commenting function around sections of more abstract material in the middle and at the end.

In these abstract sections we are more or less directly translating the raw sensor data from five body-worn inertial sensors NGIMU from x-io worn on wrists, torso and ankles. The custom-made software in the piece records a trace of past movements and combine those seamlessly with real-time sensor data. Thereby, the dancer will continuously be confronted with her current and previous actions, just as we humans are constantly living and experiencing the world through a dialogue between what we do now and what we did in the past. The final section, where the dancer’s disinterested movements seem to gradually build a roaring fire, stand as a contrast to the strong emotions of desperation and hope conveyed by the voice of Greta Thunberg.

We hope to develop this into a complete piece during 2025.