The critical questions of this project are:
What is the relationship between dance and technology?
How can the kinesthetic dimensions of interaction be made visible?
Ilya Vidrin and Partnering Lab’s project continues the research conducted during their 2020 ArtLab residency, which was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They will spend a week in March 2025 at ArtLab developing a new performance that will premiere at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
Proxies is a transdisciplinary dance theatre production set to premiere in 2026 at the intersection of performance, computation, and information design. Drawing on research in data privacy, loneliness, and ethics of care, the project is intended as a provocation to consider not only the limits of what can be captured through technology but also how the fidelity of what is captured may be compromised when moving across kinesthetic, computational, visual, and musical representations.
This project development at ArtLab brings together a team of collaborators, including multi-instrumentalists Eric Seligman and Melanie Hsu; Ilya Vidrin, Artistic Director; Steven Geofrey, Design and Data Visualization; and six professional dancers.
The development of this project is also supported by the Knight Foundation, The Boston Foundation, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, where it will premiere in 2026.
Proxies page: https://fluidencodings.com/projects/deconstructing-proxies