Choreographing for Virtual Reality
16 DEC 2016
Together with the choreographer Patricia Okenwa we were working on the dance part of Dust. Bearing in mind that the audience will see the dance piece from any point of view at any time, the very process of choreographing is being questioned. How does one approach this challenge? How does one create a dance piece knowing there are no stage areas? What happens when there is no right or left, no centrestage, upstage or downstage?
One can think of David Zambrano’s Soul Project or Amidst (2011, The Painted Bird II by Pavel Zuštiak) in which the audience watches the performance freely from anywhere in the space, except this time, the space is virtual, without any laws of physics (for instance bird’s-eye view) but unlike in video, in DUST one can’t predict where the camera is positioned. The spectator is the camera unpredictably moving in time. Will the effort to answer all these questions influence the movement vocabulary? How will such a movement phrase look like?
— Photos by Vojtěch Brtnický