Learning to Dance with Angelfish: Choreographic Encounters Between Virtuality and Reality

Abstract

Through digitally extended performances bone memories mix with machine memories fusing the gravitational flows of the dancer in space-time with the place-unboundedness of digital forms. In learning to dance with data, spaces unfold, striating the present moment through multiple dimensions. In these matrixial spaces the stage metamorphoses from a physical location — grounded, fixed, actual — to a relational space — incorporating the ungrounded, the fluid and the virtual. Performance identities which were previously place-bound become mobilised and de-territorialised. The privileged state of performance as a ‘being here’ in the elusive present is no longer embodied in the taken-for-granted ‘thereness’ of the stage of soil and flesh, it becomes a superabundance of becomings experienced as hyper-realities and distributed presence. In this context, the ‘being in the body’ of embodiment is radically reconfigured.

In searching for the something else beyond self and other, what or who are the we that haunts us? Who are the strangers at the heart of the self who disrupt our sanctuary with disquieting moments? Mothers, dogs, sea urchins, whores, mystics, muggers, diseased spores, derelictions and secretions. I spawned multitudinous becomings within a constantly deformable body, a malleable container of anarchic desires. I became so lucid that I, in becoming not-I could disappear beyond a thousand species of diverse others. My fantasy was to be everywhere and no-one. To cast off this sluggish flesh and become hyperreal. To glide with sea creatures in a rock pool phantasmagoria.