Words like innovative and groundbreaking get bandied about a lot in interactive arts spaces. They can mean anything, from a completely new type of performance to a slight variation on a tried and tested formula, and all manner of things in between.
We at the voidspace can’t help but think that AΦE, the company formed and directed by its namesakes Aoi Nakamura and Esteban Lecoq, is an outfit that genuinely deserves this description. The company uses technology, together with any other tools its creators can imagine, to present dance and movement-led storytelling in ways that have genuinely never been seen before.
The company’s production, WHIST, is no exception. Inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud and Japanese artist Shuji Terayama, WHIST uses virtual and augmented reality technologies to blend the concrete and the imaginary, conscious and unconscious. Visitors explore the story of WHIST, and interact with its surreal environment, using only their instincts as a guide. The journey can lead them along one of 76 different paths.
After touring to more than 13 countries across the globe, WHIST is coming home to A+E Lab, the company’s studio and creative hub in Chatham, where they develop and exhibit work, and provide workshops and creative support to the community.
Aoi and Esteban join us in the voidspace to talk about the story behind AΦE, the origins of WHIST, and the importance of centring the audience in their work.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. Thank you for joining us. I’d like to start by asking you both who you are and what you do in the interactive arts space.
Esteban Lecoq:
I am Esteban Lecoq. I am French. I came to the UK 15 years ago to work for Jasmin Vardimon Company as a dancer, and this is where I met Aoi. As a company we started to think and work on our own productions, in between touring and creation with Jasmin, and then eventually carried on to focusing more on creating our own work.
Aoi Nakamura:
I am Aoi Nakamura, Co-Artistic Director and founder of AΦE. I’ve been dancing in Germany at the state theatres for 5 years, then came to UK to work with the choreographer Jasmin Vardimon. Esteban and I, started to create work together in between tours, while we were performing, and slowly realised more and more that we enjoyed creating our own work, so that’s what we focus on now.
We also became Associate Artists at the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry at the University of Kent. They gave us the opportunity to have our own studio space, located at the Historic Dockyard, Chatham, which enabled us in 2022 to launch A+E Lab, a new creative hub, where we support other people, offer different workshops for the community and organise events and sharings. So, that’s something that we do alongside creating and touring our own productions.
voidspace:
Tell me a bit more about the kind of work that you create and are interested in.
Esteban Lecoq:
I guess we are interested in creating work that we’ve never created with choreographers. Every time we feel like something is not new anymore to us, that we have already done it or experienced it, or seen it, then we’re not going to do that. We always try to look in the other direction, and see what’s going on over there, explore and lose ourselves, get to the unknown. We get really excited about the unknown. Finding expert, inspiring artists that do great work, and starting to imagine what could happen if we were to work with those people.
So, I guess that’s the type of work that we create. We’re always trying to step out of our comfort zone, and trying to see if we can find something new to us. I guess for us, the most important thing is not to repeat: “stage, dancers, lighting, costume, music, and off we go”. I think that would be the easy way, and I think there is something that’s, to us, more interesting to do. Not to say that it’s not interesting to dance on stage. My point is, if we need to make so much effort, if we have to work so hard to pull out something, let’s try to do something that we haven’t done before.
Aoi Nakamura:
We also had the opportunity to work with Punchdrunk, which got us to discover a new style of performance, Immersive theatre, where audiences were very close to us, and we had direct engagement.
At the same time, we were still dancing on stage, and seeing different things. One of our turning points was experiencing SPILL Festival, a live art festival, back in 2013 in London and performing our very own first creation the year after.
Esteban Lecoq:
SPILL Festival was an eye-opener. It was created by Robert Pacitti, we had the chance to witness work and perform alongside names like:
Lauren Jane Williams, Ron Athey, Scout Niblet, Cassils, Anti-Cool, The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein, Madeleine Botet De Lacaze, Empress Stah, Selina Thompson, Ruth Flynn and so many more!
Aoi Nakamura:
Before discovering live art, I only knew dance, that has particular way in which to be created, a kind of ‘boxed in’ way. But getting involved in live art opened our eyes, and gave us the permission to use or think anything we wanted. The live artists often use their own bodies in unusual approaches, and use everyday objects and it feels like they would create with anything that is around them. These approaches to creation encouraged us to imagine freely.
Esteban Lecoq:
The performances we saw at the SPILL Festival were very immersive work, even though they did not use the word immersive. They were just creating and telling something from their guts and using any tools they wanted. We could see video, projection mapping, installation, live music and stage performance.
Aoi Nakamura:
The new technology came into our creation because we were imagining one particular scene which needed a technology (projection mapping) to achieve creating it, which made us learn the software. So, we started to explore in that direction, which made us imagine more about new possibilities that the new technologies can offer, and our search of perfect harmonies of them all, and reimagining audience experience in performing arts. This new approach made us unique.
But we are not technologists. We don’t really like tech. If something is not working then it’s really frustrating, for example. Usually in our creation, we are not tech-driven, we would work from the story, the questions, and the concept, think what we want to achieve first, and then find out which technology we would need to achieve the experience we want to create.
voidspace:
Using technology in the context of a live performance, to what extent does it bring you closer to the story in the world of your show, and to what extent can it distance you? The thrill of live performance, some people say, is person to person. Bodies in the room.
Esteban Lecoq:
We are working on a new show, which is a live dance production, and it has a lot of technology on stage. It’s quite fragile, because it’s technically heavy. Anything could go wrong: a cable could be slightly loose, and we can’t spot it because we have, like, thousands of cables, a projector might not work. Technically, or technologically, something could go wrong. But at the end of the day, on stage we are two dancers and two musicians, and we are all performers. That’s what we do and what we are.
So, we don’t care if the tech doesn’t go forward, because in a way we don’t need the tech to tell the story. It’s within us and the experience. That’s why we are not bound by the tech, and that’s our advantage. We use tech the way we need it.
voidspace:
It’s like Aoi said about it being led by the story, or led by what you want to communicate, rather than being led by the tech. Can you tell me about what the tech is in this future production and how that’s going to work?
Esteban Lecoq:
It’s a work that’s been five years in development, and slowly matured throughout the years. It first started in 2018, with a holographic projection on a screen at the front of the stage. Then back in 2020 during the pandemic, we brought together an international creative team to Berlin.
We had holographic projection at the front of the stage, projection onto a bespoke set design which was a curved wall, made with a material that could be inflated and deflated, so it could take different shapes. The projections also matched the different shapes of this curved wall at the back of the stage. We also had a projection on the floor. The whole space had motion tracking cameras, which tracked the movement of the performers on stage, but also the audience, who was also on stage.
The costumes were also connected. The clothes of the audience and the performers’ costumes had biosensors embedded within them, so we could capture their biodata in real time, like heart rate, breathing, and we could also send some information, like heat. The costumes also inflated and deflated. They were made of translucent material which also allowed us to project on them, so we could merge them into the scenery.
That proved to be quite challenging for the time, for 2020, and it didn’t match the vision we had for the piece. So, we decided to push this thinking a little bit further, and today there are slightly different technologies involved.
voidspace:
You had to wait for the technology to catch up with your vision.
Esteban Lecoq:
Yes, kind of. It’s often the case for these productions, we would have to develop quite a lot of the tech to work with it.
Aoi Nakamura:
It’s a lot of tech that has to work together, something that has not been done before. We had to work on some of the elements from scratch.
Esteban Lecoq:
Yeah, the concept is good. We had two parts. For the first part, the audience were on stage. We had animation projected on the wall and the animation, the story, only went forward according to the audience behaviours in the space. The character was interacting in real time with the audience.
We have everything on the hard drive. When we have the opportunity, we will remount it as a piece on its own.
voidspace:
Sounds exciting.
Esteban Lecoq:
Now it’s evolved, and it’s even better. We’re working on it for next year.
voidspace:
Do keep us updated. Now, I’d like you to tell me a bit more about WHIST, the piece you’re exhibiting later this month.
Esteban Lecoq:
WHIST is the first major work of our company. It started from the wish to speak about the Minotaur.
Aoi Nakamura:
From the Greek myth about the creature that lives in the labyrinth.
We also came across a book that referenced the labyrinth as the unconscious, and the Minotaur being a monster, referencing Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny,” his theory about fear.
So, we then went to the Freud Museum in London when they had a Festival of the Unconscious. We met the psychoanalyst over there, who was working at the Freud Museum and acting as a guide during the event. We started to speak with this psychoanalyst, who came on board for this project, helping us research and giving us bunch of Freudian case studies. We’ve read a lot of his books, and we really liked it. Particularly we got inspired by ‘Wolfman’, ‘Little Hans’ and ‘Dora’, three patients that Freud analysed from their dreams, to identify their fears and unconscious desires.
Esteban Lecoq:
At the same time, we also came across Virtual Reality Technology, and we were like “Oh! Virtual reality & reality, dream & fear, conscious & unconscious…Freud!” That’s what usually happens with us. We are really intuitive people. I’m going to buy a book just because of its cover, literally, and I’m not going to read it, I’m just going to buy it, put it in the library and leave it there for years. Until one day I pull it out, read it and it inspires a whole new work. This is what happened with our current production.
voidspace:
A lot of us would definitely sympathise with that. The to-be-read pile!
Esteban Lecoq:
Yeah. Actually, about five, six years ago, I picked up this book again, because we were talking about our new production. We were starting to talk about different ideas and pulled out this book out of our library that I bought at the Whitechapel Gallery shop, a long time ago, and never read. One day, I started to read it, and it inspired all of our next three productions in progress. So, all these things naturally connected with each other. But this is for new work, coming back to WHIST…
We were interested to see how we could bring the viewer into a 360 film. We knew that 360 film couldn’t be interactive in a way that you can have a 3D animation environment where you can really interact, like in a video game, you can pick up objects and interact with characters. This is not possible in a 360 film. But we were interested by the challenge of how we can keep our audience free within these 360 worlds, and how to make the parallel between both worlds, the physical world, where our audience are present, but also the digital world, or the virtual world, where our audience is experiencing the work. That was really important for us. Our main focus was to keep the audience present in the physical world at all times.
We actually never intended to do a 360 film. We only realised that we were shooting a film when we found ourselves saying words like “action!” on set. We surprised ourselves. We wrote a script, but the script was a tool that was really needed, because we were working with so many different collaborators, from performers, to the Director of Photography, programmers, musicians etc. and we wanted everyone to be on the same page and have the same information.
Then we made a storyboard, but the storyboard just came up because we were struggling to imagine everything at the same time: to see the journey of our characters within the 360 spaces, but also to picture the journey of our audience experiencing our characters’ stories within these 360 spaces. So that was also a very important tool for us to use, a 360 storyboard.
In 2016 there was nothing out there about how to make a 360 film. It was very new, exciting, because we had the freedom to imagine, to do in any way we wanted. And I think still today, this is the beauty of creating XR experiences as there is no fixed format you need to follow.
voidspace:
Tell me a little bit more about how the 360 aspect, the audience exploration, works.
Esteban Lecoq:
It’s a little bit more complex than the audience being able to explore any rooms they want, because we are restrained by the tech, duration of the show and the number of audiences attending the show. We have a lot of restrictions we need to work around, to work out how we can achieve this.
The way we’ve done it is that there is one story, but 76 possibilities to explore it. The program that we created for WHIST captures the gaze of the audience, depending on where they are looking the most, or what they are trying to avoid looking at the most, within a scene. That could be a sound cue, a visual cue, a performer or even an object. It could be different, depending on the scene you’re in. Working with a psychoanalyst, we decided which scene to send the viewer to next, depending on their gaze based on the symbolism we’ve taken from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
voidspace:
Wow! No way! So that really is interactive. Even if you can’t physically interact with objects, it’s responding to your gaze and it’s sending you in different directions. I mean, that’s incredible.
Esteban Lecoq:
But the audience are not aware of it. It’s more like an unconscious decision.
voidspace:
That fits so well with your theming, if it’s all about Freud and the unconscious.
Esteban Lecoq:
I think WHIST is a little bit different to immersive theatre, in that we actually choreograph the audience. You’re not left alone in that 360 space, or physical space, like you could be in an immersive theatre setting. Here, we’re in control of everything. We’re controlling what you’re looking at, how you’re looking at it.
We are also trying to attract the audience’s attention. So, the way we choreograph the performers within the 360 environment is not just a random piece of choreography that we create. It’s actually meaningful in many ways. Technically, as well as story wise, there are a lot of reasons why this performer may move from left to right, or why these sounds would appear when you’re looking here and there.
We are controlling the audience from A to Z, from the moment they enter the room, the way we say hello to them, to the moment that they leave the room. It’s total control of the audience, but they are not aware of it. Every word that we say in the introduction is being worked and has been precisely defined and said at a specific moment.
voidspace:
You’re priming them. It sounds like every element is very carefully controlled and tied into the deeper purpose for the audience.
Esteban Lecoq:
Imagine three parallel worlds. You have the real world with the installation at the bottom, and on top of this you superimpose a layer which is the audience movement, then the last layer is the performers’ journey, which is our set of 360 worlds. That’s how we created the piece. What I’ve done is take tracing paper and draw from a top-down view and imagine all three elements, the objects (physical installation), audience and performers’ movement at the same time.
voidspace:
But I think that’s great, though, to create something where the audience’s choices of where they look unconsciously affect what they see next and what happens. That must have taken an awful lot of research and a lot of plotting. And to know how each choice affects what happens next, the mapping of that must have been incredibly complicated.
Esteban Lecoq:
Actually, it was incredibly fun, sometimes one little thing could unlock a huge idea or something new. But yes, it took us four years to complete this work.
voidspace:
I bet it did. I’m not surprised, honestly. I’m still trying to get my head around it. This is the first time I’ve heard of an interactive piece where the choice can come from where you’re choosing not to look.
Esteban Lecoq:
We made things, actions, purposefully sometimes, be either disgusting, or sometimes erotic.
Aoi Nakamura:
I guess uncomfortable elements.
Esteban Lecoq:
Yeah, things that are usually hidden or that we avoid talking openly about. This came from the fact that we saw the work of a Japanese Avantgard theatre maker called Shuji Terayama. When we saw his work, it gave us the feeling that it allowed us to also explore our own territories, that we’d never talked about to friends, or families, or shared with each other. It’s like we pulled something out, something quite personal. That’s what we’ve done for WHIST, pull things out. We buried symbolism, under objects, sounds, choreography, and where the audience experiences the work.
But for me, the most interesting kind of interactivity in the work is not what happens during the work, but it’s what happens once the performance is finished. Because at the end of the experience, everyone has gone through different paths in the story. So, they experience the VR part for different total lengths of time. Everyone starts together at the same time, but every audience member comes back to us, at the end, at different times.
Once the audience have finished doing the VR, they are going to start chatting with each other. Even people who don’t know each other, because they’ve been through an experience together. That’s the power of collective experiences. Realising they’re allowed to speak to each other, starting to share their experiences and finding out the ways in which their experiences were different. That’s the moment we feel where WHIST exists within the audience.
voidspace:
I love the fact that what you’re doing is that you’re taking that kind of magic of the interaction between the audience, which I think has been on the periphery of a lot of these sorts of experiences. All these little connections around the work that a lot of people have, when they share their experience. I love the fact that you’re taking that and actually making it integral to the work itself.
Esteban Lecoq:
Yes, that was the most important part. The most important part of our work is the audience experience and what they carry with them after. And for this, we have to put them at the centre of the work. So, they are always the trigger for the work.
Imagine an engine. We create an engine, and the audience is the fuel. Without fuel, the engine is just sitting here, a piece of metal. Well made, well crafted, very well engineered. But without fuel, it doesn’t do anything. The audience is what makes WHIST work.
The current run of WHIST takes place 9 November at KM0, Mulhouse (France) and 16-19 November 2023 at A+E Lab, Chatham (UK).
AΦE are also running a 360 Filmmaking Workshop on 26 November 2023 at A+E Lab, Chatham (UK).
Buy tickets for WHIST Chatham here.
Book 360 Filmmaking Workshop Chatham here.
Register for WHIST Mulhouse here.
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