“I believe that what we are doing together with the projects we are working on is using tech in a way that can enhance our human skills, to create a space of empathy, find connection with people that are far apart.” Dance artist Livia Massarelli sums up exactly what is so exciting about Unwired Dance, the project founded by Clemence Debaig, and with which Livia is collaborating, that explores the intersection between dance and technology in physical, virtual and hybrid spaces.
Unwired’s projects to date include exploring questions around social dynamics, asking what happens when we use tech to give individuals or groups control of a dancer’s body, using tech to heighten the contrast between a person’s outer face and inner thoughts, and pushing forward how dance can be used and communicated in virtual reality, and both Clemence and Livia brim with energy, curiosity and hope for what they can achieve in this emerging interactive field.
Clemence and Livia join us in the voidspace to discuss how Unwired use new media to channel and heighten a very fundamental human experience: communication and connection through the body, and some of the challenges and revelations they have met with along the way.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. Thank you for coming to speak to me. I’m going to start off by asking you a very simple open question: who you both are and what you do.
Clemence Debaig:
My name is Clemence Debaig. I am the artistic director of Unwired Dance Theatre. I’ve got a bit of a strange background: I’m a dance artist with background as a UX designer and a creative technologist, and I make work at the intersection of all those things. I really like creating and choreographing interactive experiences that involve crowd behaviours, audience interaction, participatory work involving movement and embodied interactive experience.
I have three jobs: I’m a lecturer and researcher at [Portsmouth] University, I’m the artistic director of Unwired Theatre and also the director of Unwired Studio, which is more of a creative studio that works for other artists. I collaborate a lot with other artists when they need to bring that kind of skill set into their work, especially on the creative tech side of things, but with the knowledge of movement to collaborate with them. I collaborate a lot with other choreographers or artists who work in those kinds of spaces.
Livia Massarelli:
My name is Livia Masparelli. I am a dance artist and a wellbeing coach. Wellbeing is part of my interest, as well, in the dance world and beyond. I’ve been working a lot on dance as an expression of our inner words. I collaborate with Clemence and Unwired Dance Theatre on different projects. We have an exciting project we are doing together at the moment, Where We Meet.
I use movement as a language through teaching, choreographing, performing with different companies. I work as rehearsal director with Equilibrium in Italy. I teach in different dance universities as a guest lecturer. One of those is the Rambert School in London.
voidspace:
I’d love to hear a little bit more about Unwired Dance’s origins and general aims as a company.
Clemence Debaig:
Unwired Dance was born in the middle of the pandemic. I was doing a lot of work under my own name, and I realised that because I was working a lot with other people and a lot of collaborators, I needed a home to gather all of this work under. Not just my work, but also the work we do as a collective of artists. Even if it’s a collective around one project, you need more of an overarching entity to produce it under. On this side of the world, compared to the US, individuality is not necessarily very well supported. Working as a company allowed us to get more support, to scale up the work. So that’s how it was born.
What we do is bring dance and technology together around participatory experiences for audiences. A lot of the work is interactive and involves different formats. We don’t do that much stage-based performance: we’ve been working with all sorts of technologies from wearables, to motion capture, to VR.
We perform online, we’ve been doing things in the Metaverse, we’ve been doing things in open spaces. Where We Meet is more of an installation-based format. Site specific work, and work in unconventional sites is usually what we strive for.
voidspace:
Can you give me some examples of the different types of interactivities and types of participation that your work allows?
Clemence Debaig:
What links all the pieces that I’ve been working on is using technology as a proxy to get people to reflect around empathy, and then around that there are notions of agency and control that are being questioned. How much control do we have other humans? How technology encourages you to behave a certain way, but at the same time, how can we use technology to empathise more with other beings?
At the genesis of Unwired, there were a lot of mini social experiments. One of these, Bother. was an installation based durational piece. You would enter a space, where there’s always a dancer present, and you are presented with two buttons: a red button and a blue button. You can decide if you want to push this person in front of you into positive emotions or negative emotions. Depending on the decisions you make, the performer in front of you will embody that emotion, and there are interactive projections that enhance the effect of that emotional state.
I put in two sets of buttons, which ended up turning it into a collective experience. People were arguing in this space, over whether to push the performer into a positive or negative state, and people were really playing with the concept. It was interesting to see how, depending on how comfortable people are with technology, how detached they were from the human in front of them. You could see some people were a bit more on the gaming side of things. They would see the experience as being given the right to mess with the performer, and would take that opportunity and have fun with it. Others were not comfortable with doing that at all, because they saw the performer as a real human being in front of them. We really played with those ideas: that you have a performer in front of you, and we’re giving you the right to mess with that person. How much empathy do you develop towards that character?
voidspace:
It reminds me of some of Marina Abramovic’s work – Rhythm O etc. Work that explored how an audience would react when they felt empowered to treat the performer however they liked. What did you work on next?
Clemence Debaig:
During the pandemic, I developed another piece of work, Strings. That made Unwired Dance what it is now, in terms of scaling up. I developed networked haptic wearables that allow the audience to control my movement from a distance, and that enabled remote audiences to interact with a piece in a very nonlinear way, a very different way from a lot of the performances that were on zoom at the time.
The way Strings works is I have haptic wearables on each of my limbs, and the audience uses a specially developed app on their phones which enables them to decide which body part to activate. When they decide which part to activate, the app would send the wearable a vibration, and then when the wearable vibrates, the performer knows to move the relevant body part. This is a collective experience: the audience have to agree with each other in terms of which body part is going to move. Strings led to a lot of interesting exploration in terms of which formats we could use to present this sort of work. It started online and moved to a more hybrid format when society started reopening after lockdown, allowing us to present it to larger audiences. I also did performances with as few as five people, and it’s been interesting to see the different ways audiences of different sizes behave.
voidspace:
Is there a difference in behaviours between when people are doing it online and when they’re doing it in person? Does behaviour change depending on the size of crowd, or the demographic of the crowd? There are so many variables there.
Clemence Debaig:
The size of the crowd is an interesting variable, because with larger crowds you end up getting a lot of lag in the decision making, and you can identify a lot of leader/follower behaviours. Someone might decide to go rogue, against the crowd, and hope that they can encourage people to follow them. What people choose to do is visually represented by dots on the phone screen, and you can see everyone else’s dots. So, there may be a swarm of dots following someone who takes the lead and goes rogue, you’ve got a leader who goes off on their own, and the ones who follow where everyone else is going. Sometimes you’ll have two people going rogue, breaking away from the crowd, at the same time, and then, when audiences are together in person, people may start to talk to each other to reach a decision about where to go.
When it’s online, and everyone’s just at home, no-one’s talking to anyone else. That’s what makes it interesting, because you’re only looking at the screen – and, obviously, the performer – but you do not communicate with the others, apart from just seeing where they are on the screen.
By contrast, I’ve had a few in-person experiences, especially with smaller crowds, where I had friends coming together and teaming up. I presented Strings last year at an escape room festival, Escape Escapade Arcade. People came mainly to play escape rooms, so they were in this mindset, where they came as a group. So, I had teams of five coming to play escape rooms together, and coming to see Strings while they were there.
They were collaborating verbally, and because it was in a really small venue, so I could hear them! I was performing, and thinking: “This is so weird. I can hear what you’re trying to do!” They were collaborating so much, trying to make me do particular choreography. Right arm, left arm and right leg, make me walk. It was a lot of fun. Very different to a hundred people behind a zoom screen.
Every time, the main feedback I had is that people, even if they could only see the dots on the screen, felt weirdly connected to each other, as well as feeling connected to the performance itself. They hadn’t been expecting the experience to create a sense of collective collaboration.
voidspace:
I’m really interested in the extent to which in both of those projects that you just mentioned, if people feel bonded with each other as opposed to bonded with the performer, or if you get a sense of divided loyalty. I think it’s interesting there’s that disconnect, especially when you’re talking about Bother – the one with the positive and the negative emotions. It reminds me of all of those social experiments, where people have ended up treating others badly, giving electric shocks and so on. Do people mistreat the performers in these scenarios because they’ve been given permission? Is it because they know it’s fake?
Clemence Debaig:
I had a lot of weird experiences doing Bother.
We were twelve dancers, because we had to have someone in the performance space all day long. It was in an exhibition context, over four days. I was one of the dancers. I remember taking the morning slot one day, which is usually very empty because no one is in the gallery at that time. This guy came in, and he stayed with me for 20 minutes, touching all the buttons and making me go through all the different combinations of emotional states, and then staring at me. And I was thinking “This is so weird, please go!”
voidspace:
Oh, that is weird.
Clemence Debaig:
It was really weird. Someone else entered the room, and he stopped being a creep. There was this sense of : “You’re here, you’re part of the exhibition. I’m going to watch this and see what happens”.
voidspace:
You kind of objectified.
Clemence Debaig:
Completely. In a show like Bother you’re creating a magic circle, where there are different rules, but it’s not explicitly described, what you’re not allowed to do. And so people have their own definition of what is allowed, which is my intention. It’s so much fun to perform. I always think: “I’m game. Go for it!”
voidspace:
I suppose, ultimately, you know that you’re safe.
Clemence Debaig:
At any moment I can get up and leave.
voidspace:
No one’s actually giving you an electric shock or anything. But still, there’s that suspension of disbelief. If someone is willingly suspending their disbelief to think that they’re potentially distressing you, it gets really weird. Murky.
Clemence Debaig:
The worst were kids. Kids are annoying, because they want to push the boundaries of the human in front of them more than adults do. They want to see if I’m really going to do what they ask me to do. In Bother, they were constantly changing modes and then making sure, testing our reactivity to the system. Honestly, if I were doing it I’d click once, see how that develops and maybe I’d go a bit further. But the kids just: [hammers all the buttons]
voidspace:
I suppose kids are at that point where they’re trying to test boundaries all the time. Kids are just boundary testing machines. That’s how they learn. That’s how their brains develop.
Clemence Debaig:
In Bother, there’s a ceiling projection, which creates a natural performance space that adults don’t cross, where there could be a bit of projection. Whereas kids don’t care. They’ll get in there. Parents! Come on!
voidspace:
Get with the programme, parents!
Tell me about some more of the projects that you’re doing.
Clemence Debaig:
We’re wrapping up a project at the moment called Discordance. Livia Masparelli is one of the performers I used to perform. I’ve brought Livia into the project for about a year now. This one is a VR piece, that is, live VR performance. I joined about three years ago now, a group of artists called Onboard XR, who had the ambition to onboard more artists doing work in virtual reality. Through the years, and through different showcases, we built a lot of capabilities for customising our own Web Excel server to put on live performances. Discordance is within that context. It’s a mad hybrid performance. You can do anything you want in terms of where this is presented.
We have one dancer in London who is in the space, but also in full motion capture that we are streaming live into the virtual reality space, dancing with another dancer who’s in New York that has the same setup. The platform we’re using welcomes audiences into the virtual space as well. It gives us the flexibility to welcome people from home who have their own headsets, or just from just a web browser at home. That also means we can bring headsets into physical venues.
We’ve done a version where we had people with us on the sides of the space in headsets, and then we also have a projection version where you can have people in a more traditional proscenium theatre, watching the performance on the projection screen. But the whole piece is very much built on the presence of the audience within the virtual space. We’ve never done it with nobody in VR with us, because that wouldn’t work.
The narrative is built around the idea that the audience represents parts of the personality of the main character. Then the story goes through a few stages: having a dream life and creative ambitions that get completely shattered, and being pushed towards a darker production line life, having to follow a very established path, and trying and failing to connect to that. Feeling this discordance internally, with all sorts of different personalities: what is expected from you, what the creative side you might want, and other influences in your life that prevent you from connecting with others. You are trying to constantly look for that element of connection, which brings you to looking for friends on the internet. Then you end up at the bottom of the internet, where – this is the big metaphor in the piece – you get completely smashed by the unkindness that you find there. You arrive at a moment of despair. Then you can rely on the audience to help you to reconnect with those parts of the personality, embrace all the sides of the personality.
voidspace:
It’s so interesting. I’ve talked to a few different practitioners who are experimenting with VR and AR and time and time again, thematically, the kinds of shows that seem to work really well in this space are things that deal with the psyche, with the subconscious, with the internal life. I wonder if there’s something about the medium that lends itself to that sense of interiority.
Clemence Debaig:
That’s very interesting because the project that Livia and I are doing together is about revealing what you can’t see on the outside. There’s something around exile in general, around exposing the inwards, exposing the psyche, exposing memories and internal experiences, that keeps coming back, for sure.
voidspace:
I wonder if it’s the nature of the space, because it’s a space you can create, a space that’s freed up from the physical, the concrete, and you can use abstraction and movement.
There can be kind of a scepticism about, is VR going to be distancing? Should dance be about person to person, body to body? Should it be about the presence in the room? Obviously, you guys have been doing something very different with this technology. So, I’d love to hear what you’d have to say about that.
Clemence Debaig:
This technology is a means to an end, really. It has a lot of potential for achieving a lot of different things. But it’s not replacing the in person experience. You’re creating something new. It’s a new genre. It’s a new way of expressing the body and bringing it into the space. We’re working with motion capture – I also teach that – and I have reflected a lot about that form of digital embodiment. It’s erasing a lot of the subtlety of human movement. We’re very clear with this, and that shows even in the way this current project is choreographed. It’s very simple, and very easy to read as to what the movement is. Because the technology is not reliable. The technology for both capturing and perceiving movement is so glitchy that you’re not going to be able to read a subtle hand movement. You have to have a big line to actually make it work in the space. Choreographically, it’s really boring, if you put this on stage. But when you are in the VR space, you understand that it’s bringing a different way of encountering each other, coming from a movement.
I think this work has to happen, because otherwise we’re going to forget the body in virtual spaces. VR is such a sight-first medium that we tend to forget all the benefits of how it can also be a very embodied experience. We prioritise the visuals so much, so I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of how technology can bring more of the body and more dance into it. But the more dancers there are playing with the medium, the more we’re going to do interesting things with it.
I would say the context of the pandemic was different to what we’re doing right now. The first time I started doing work in VR live was the first time I could get a bit of a sense of looking into someone’s virtual eyes, the way I would interact with an audience in person. We were so deprived of that during lockdown. Even if I was doing very interactive shows online, it was still in my living room with a camera filming me.
voidspace:
We did the best we could, didn’t we, in those days?
Clemence Debaig:
We never managed to get that moment of direct connection with an audience, when we worked on camera, whereas the first time I performed in VR, I found that I could sense the humans behind it far more than I could when I was working with a camera based medium. It was a very different experience. You can start feeling each other’s body language. I’ve spent a lot of time in that space, so I’m developing things like phantom touch, that brings you closer to that virtual body.
Phantom touch is a phenomenon that’s appearing for hardcore VR users. We spend a lot of time in VR social environments. and a lot of VR chat users start developing this, where even if you do not have a physical sensation of touch, when you are touching your virtual body, you are rewiring your brain to think that there is a physical touch. We start feeling the impression of physical touch where there’s no physical touch.
There’s a lot of neuroscience around this. You’re rewiring your brain to think that if I see this virtual hand on my virtual arm, that I’m being touched, so I’m going to feel touch.
As part of the work I do at Goldsmiths University, I’ve been part of a project called Mocap Streamer. We’ve been researching a lot of dance in remote locations, with motion capture. We’ve been looking at what is necessary in terms of the representation of the body, to be able to read body language and anticipate the movement of the other dancer. Part of that was looking at reducing latency and all of that, but there was also the more artistic aspect of how you represent the body.
When I joined the project, at first I would bring all my abstractions and pretty visuals into it, and that actually did not work at all. Dancers were just playing with it like an interactive installation, and making pretty shapes, but you felt very disconnected from the other dancer.
Then we looked at what is needed to feel the other person, anticipate the other person. We did a lot of exercises around mirroring each other, being able to improvise in the virtual space at a very slow pace. It’s really interesting to see what you can feel and read from a digital body.
We need more movement practitioners in the virtual space, because I feel that a lot of the negative things that are happening in VR social spaces – harassment, sexual assaults- are partly down to the lack of body language. Most of the forms of communication you have in those spaces are verbal, but a lot of consent is usually given by your body language, accepting or rejecting people approaching you. There’s none of that in virtual spaces, unless you’ve got full body tracking, but that’s not what people use on a daily basis. So, I think we need to start bringing more of the understanding of the body into big tech, how people design spaces and even how even the headsets are designed, so we can bring in the body and not just the voice and the face.
voidspace:
We know just from the regular online world, that when people are disconnected from each other’s physical presence, we’re all just kind of brains on sticks. And it gives people licence to behave in ways that they maybe wouldn’t if there were other people in the room. It breaks down the social contract, doesn’t it?
Clemence Debaig:
Completely. I do a lot of work in VR chat in a very positive way. I teach contemporary dance with the VR Dance Academy in VR chat and it’s a bit absurd, coming from an actual in-person contemporary world and teaching a bunch of furries and sexualized bouncy boobed figures. It’s very strange. As the class goes along, many of them tend to change their avatars into something more appropriate, which also quite interesting.
I got more interested in this world and trying to understand who the people are in there. Why do they decide to dance in VR? There’s a lot to do with body and gender dysmorphia and the fact that they feel comfortable in this virtual body, they feel comfortable in not having the judgement of being their physical self in a studio. That’s how a lot of them have started dancing, and now I’m hearing that some of them are daring to go in person into studios. It’s such a positive outcome.
voidspace:
I think that’s beautiful. I love the idea of that as a gateway and as a tool for people who face those kinds of issues, to the extreme, where they wouldn’t even go to a class in the first place. I know so many people who enjoy watching this kind of work and would love to understand more about it by but who feel too self-conscious or too worried about their own clumsiness or their own physicality to ever take that step. So, I think that sounds wonderful.
Clemence Debaig:
It’s great.
We’re bringing some of those principles into our latest project, which I’m working on with Livia. We met in November 2021, at the Dance Hackathon, which is a dance hackathon at the European level, that brings dancers and creative technologists and producers and costume designers etc all together in a room in a three-day hackathon, where they all make something. I didn’t know before going, but there was a prize to win. I was just interested in meeting like-minded people I can play with. We worked on a prototype show over the three days together, and our team worked really well together, we made beautiful work. And we won the prize!
voidspsace:
You won the prize you didn’t even know existed. That is amazing. That’s probably one reason why you won it, because you didn’t have the pressure. You were able to play, you were able to stay in that playful space.
Clemence Debaig:
Yes, completely. As a result of that prize, we had a little bit of a financial incentive to push it further, but we’re also really in love with this project. The project is called Where We Meet. That’s how we met as well. It’s an audio-based dance installation, where the audience walk around the space and as they approach dancers, they can hear their inner thoughts. It’s based on the idea that you can never really know what’s happening in someone’s mind. They might be putting on a brave face, they might be putting on a personality, but they might be going through some challenges.
Each of the characters you encounter are going through some very specific mental health challenges and they have a double way of presenting themselves, between the public version of themselves and then what they’re actually thinking. This is pre-recorded audio, like your inner monologue. But this is not a static piece, because the dancers can then in return, decide what’s being shared. We build a narrative arc: the more you advance through the piece, the more the dancers realise there are people around and invite you to interact with them, and consciously let the people around them understand what they’re going through.
We have those moments of interaction, either as a one-to-one interaction or as a group interaction. You’re in pitch black and you have characters under spotlight, which is an interactive projection that reacts to people’s presence. And because they react to the presence of people, it gets smaller and smaller as you approach the dancer. So, you’re always in the dark as an audience member, you’re never in the spotlight. We found that this frees people from being self-conscious about the movement, so they know they’re not going to have to step into the spotlight to interact. We found that they then felt a bit freer to then follow those interactive cues. As the performance went on, you got people who were just breaking down all their boundaries and just going for it by the end.
voidspace:
I think for a lot of people, certainly for people who’ve done interactive or immersive theatre as audience a lot, there’s that unspoken rule, isn’t there, that you stay at the edge of the light. The edges of the performance are defined by it, and it becomes part of the unspoken rules of engagement. So, the idea of the light just shrinking and giving you that, it sounds incredible.
Clemence Debaig:
It was almost a design flaw, in a way. Originally, we wanted to have the light embrace both audience and dancer, and then we realised that people didn’t want to approach, because they didn’t want to be in the light, and so we changed the lighting so that the light was more like a boundary.
voidspace:
That’s the joy of play testing, isn’t it? You don’t really quite know how things are going to work until you get real people doing it.
Livia, can I ask you a little bit about what it’s been like approaching this work as a performer and collaborator into this space? I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey as well.
Livia Massarelli:
My journey is from the opposite side, because I came from performance and body presence. It was a very new journey for me to do this, especially with Discordance, because it was my first experience in virtual reality. It was something really different from what I was used to, at the beginning. It took a little bit of time to get used to that, especially the dizziness of not having real spatial anchors, because I’m so used as a dancer to perceiving my body in the space, and taking points in the space as my points of reference. Even when you are turning like crazy, you always have a spot to anchor you.
It was really weird at the beginning, because I needed to think about how I used my body in a different way. But the good thing is that it was a different way, but I still had a body. It wasn’t the way I was used to thinking about and perceiving myself, but I had an avatar, and this avatar was allowing me to connect with other people in virtual space, who were, most of the time, not in the room with me. So, it gave me an additional opportunity to real life, let’s say. That is something that I really love about this performance, Discordance. I could connect with another dancer who is really far away, because she’s in New York. So, I think it’s a very positive experience, very different.
I needed time to work out how to do it. Clemence was super nice in helping me and supporting me in understanding how to deal with that. Because also, as she was saying before, the range of movement you can do is still limited because the tech is not there yet, but also, because you are performing with a headset that is heavy, and with different body perception. So, when we were rehearsing without the VR, I was moving one way, and afterwards in VR, the weight of my head, for example was heavier. So, I needed to move in a different way in order to make sure I didn’t lose my balance because of course my head was heavier, I didn’t have my spatial reference, little things like that. I needed to relearn to dance in a different setting. It was a very interesting journey, that I really liked. It’s very different but very beautiful.
I’m curious to see how, with Clemence, we can push these boundaries, how many ways we can push the physical body, in virtual reality. Because I’ve been noticing that I was finding my own ways to dance, to push the skills of my body- that is a trained dancer’s body – in order to be able to do something in an environment that is different from real life, to get the most out of this different medium.
voidspace:
You have to train yourself to move in different ways.
Livia Masarelli:
Yes, but you are still dealing with your own physical body. Even though you see something different – your virtual avatar – it’s still your own body that you’re moving.
The interaction is different. The way we place ourselves in the physical world is different to how we place ourselves in the virtual world, and how we use the physical body is different. There are a lot of questions about how we can use the body, research questions for the future. But it’s good that we are doing it, because we are putting ourselves in a place where we can have questions. I think that’s the most important thing, instead of being in a comfortable place that we know, where everything is always the same.
voidspace:
I agree. It can only go forward, can’t it? You can only really build at this point.
Actually, that brings me really neatly onto a couple of my last questions. First of all, what is a challenge that you’re proudest of overcoming so far?
Clemence Debaig:
One of the challenges I’m really proud of overcoming is the fact that there are not really a lot of people doing live mocap in virtual reality, and I feel I’ve made a dent into that research question. When I started working in VR, we thought that a lot wasn’t possible, technically. But I didn’t just give up and move on to something else. I ended up building the ability to stream live data into virtual spaces. I needed to bring the moving body into that space, and I was determined to find a way to do it. It started as a technical challenge, that I overcame with the intention of bringing dance into the medium.
There were a few of us thinking about that, when we started out. Valentine James did a performance called Sugar, and I feel we were working with the same intentions around that time, around movement. Practitioners during the pandemic wanted to bring movement and dance into virtual spaces. Valentine James was working with Ibeam on developing the Volumetric Performance Capture, where they had made a raspberry pi and that could send performers with no technical skills to stream volumetric data into virtual spaces. A beautiful project.
I took the route of using motion capture, mainly because I had access to the kits through university. The university was closed, I had the equipment with me, and I thought I would use them, as I had them. That was very opportunistic of me, but for me, that’s one of the biggest successes, pushing forward and making it happen.
voidspace:
Creating your own genre? It’s not bad.
Livia Massarelli:
For me, coming from live performance, I feel I’m on that path of using tech in order to bring people together. The sensation we usually have, especially in performing art, is that tech is something very complicated that will make our life harder, so it’s better to stay away from it and just use the body, that is already amazing.
And I still think that, but I believe that what we are doing together with the projects we are working on is using tech in a way that can enhance our human skills, to create a space of empathy, find connection with people that are far apart. This is the thing I’m most proud of, because I believe it’s something that is helping us as artists to go in the direction we wanted to go anyway. We are just looking, and finding, and using new tools and to go there, and hopefully to go there a little bit faster. It’s just not a matter of speed, it’s a matter of how intense the experience might be, and I think tech is helping us in doing that.
voidspace:
That’s just so exciting. I’d love to know about your plans and your outlook for the future.
Clemence Debaig:
We are wrapping up Discordance at the moment, because it’s unlikely we’re going to perform it live anytime soon. We are in the process of recording all the mocap, to maybe work on a standalone, not live version of it.
After that, we will focus our energy on Where We Meet. We are looking for partners at the moment. We’ve reached a bit of a limit in terms of how far we’ve been able to push the project, and so we’re looking for financial support. We’re working with Rambert School of Dance to bring the project into a week-long residency with the students, for them to be exposed to this way of working, but also to do some choreographic research with them, and to bring a little bit of financial support to the project.
Where We Meet is in French because we presented it last year at Maison La Dance in Lyon, so we are working on an English version. We’ve got the text, but we don’t have the voice recording yet, and we’re working with Rambert to develop the characters further. Then we’re going to work on the development of a third character. We have one character who struggles with body image, and we have one character who is an apparent social butterfly, but actually suffers a lot from loneliness. We are going to work on a third character, that suffers from perfectionism.
We want to bring a lot of diversity into the movement of the piece as well. We’re thinking about working with someone who’s not necessarily from a contemporary dance background, bringing other types of movers into the space. We’re working on that with a hope that we’re going to start touring a three-character version from April 2024, and hopefully over the summer.
Livia Massarelli:
We’ve also been doing research on the psychological side of it. I’m a wellbeing coach, and we will also collaborate with a therapist, to understand and speak about mental health challenges in a way that doesn’t sound dark and harmful for the audience.
We’ve been thinking a great deal about how we can use this performance to prompt reflection, but also allow people to leave the space with a sense of hope and connection, and the sense that there is something good they can take out of it. It’s not only about speaking about a problem but trying to find solutions; to be uplifting.
voidspace:
What advice would you have for aspiring creators in your field, and interactive arts in general?
Clemence Debaig:
Start somewhere. I see in my teaching work, that sometimes when people start and they’re terrified. Making what they want to make looks like an impossible mountain to climb. So, I would say: Start somewhere. It’s the type of work that you never get right the first time, so you need to start by prototyping something small, experimenting with it and iterating on it.
Livia Massarelli:
I agree. Take small steps. Also, do something you are really passionate about. It’s an art industry, so we need to be fuelled by our passion. If we try to change our projects just to please the industry, it’s even harder and more overwhelming. So just try and go for something that you really like to do, that gives you something back, because it’s an exchange. We need to do something we are passionate about.
Find out more about Unwired Dance here
Unwired Dance will be performing STRINGS by at voidspace live on 9 June 2024 at Theatre Deli, London