Dancing with the Nonhuman: An Aesthetics of Encounter (AR 545)

This artistic research project challenges common notions of human-robot relationships by foregrounding the differences between humans and machines instead of obscuring them. Our diffractive performance-making practice brings together creative robotics, dance, and choreography to explore how humans and machines are always already entangled. Drawing on feminist new materialist concepts, Dancing with the Nonhuman harnesses dancers' kinaesthetic experience to probe into rigid subject-object boundaries and to mobilise and reimagine them.

Dancing with the Nonhuman [SYD-2-2-1]

A semi-structured improvisation with two dancers, two cube costumes, and one cube performer (cube robot).

The semi-structed, improvisational performance work was first performed as part of the exhibition SHErobots at the Tin Sheds Gallery, The University of Sydney, Australia, in December 2022.

Posthuman dramaturgy:

Petra Gemeinboeck

Choreography:

Petra Gemeinboeck, Arabella Frahn-Starkie, Felix Palmerson, and Siobhan McKenna

Creative robotics:

Rob Saunders

Dance performers:

Arabella Frahn-Starkie, Felix Palmerson

Soundscape:

Robert Downie

Video documentation:

Michele Barker and Kristina Mah

Video editing:

Michele Barker and Petra Gemeinboeck