Where We Meet, which just ran at the Cockpit in London, is a piece of immersive theatre blending contemporary dance with wearable technology and extended reality (XR). In this interview Esmee Wright speaks to Clemence Debaig, Co-director & Creative Technology Lead, about the project.
Where We Meet at The Cockpit, London
For those people who perhaps don’t know your practice, can you tell me how the performance will function in Where We Meet?
For the audience there will be two types of ticket, an active participant and an observer option. With the active ticket you will be able to come into the space, where three dancers will be under a spotlight each. Active participants can walk around, and the closer you get to each character, the more you get of their inner monologue. It’s a choose-your-own adventure style performance, with active participants moving around while each character is living their own lives simultaneously.
You hear their inner world, their struggles and hopes in real time, and in your own time, as you make your own decisions about what to hear.
The dancers also have control over what is being shared thanks to a device on their body and they will be engaging in moments of interaction with the audience to participate and engage with them – gentle interactions such as shared meditation, mirroring, not dancing but coping mechanisms which each character is using for their own healing.
For seated participants, there will be tablets which give you a top-down view of the space, and you will be able to move yourself around the space virtually with a cursor.
Why did you decide to bring technology into dance for this performance?
A few things came into play in creating this performance of Where We Meet. My own art practice is at the middle of dance and technology. This specific project was born out of the Dance-athon at the end of 2021, which was meant to bring together dancers, creative technologies, artists and designers over three days, where I met my co-director and choreographer Livia Massarelli. She was working as a choreographer and also as a mental health coach.
We were both interested in revealing the unseen, that mental world that is difficult to show using just words and body language, as well as exploring the possibilities of empathy and helping people to connect. Technology was an obvious solution as it was already a part of my practice.
The themes were a consequence of 2021, and where we were, were surrounded by communication technology but lacking the opportunities to properly communicate because of lockdowns. Communication has still been an issue we’ve seen, as there are plenty of communication methods, social media, et cetera, and yet we still struggle to communicate.
How did you find organising and developing this with the dancers?
The dancers in Where We Meet are managing so much at once in the performance. They are getting used to working with words, not music, not beats or counts of the bar. The performances themselves are broadly improvised, but structured – they need to give space for the audience and be hyper aware of what is happening around them to interact with that, but there is also a recorded monologue, so they need to be performing what is true to the words, as well as managing the tech, being hyper aware of where they are in the script and in the dramatic evolution of that character in order to make the right choices for the character. Working with them with the tech, with having the audience being that close to them, and with several dancers over the years, each have had different experiences with it. Some love it, they feel that every performance is unique, that its very stimulating. Others prefer focusing on the quality of the movement and exploring that aspect of dance practice. It has been interesting to find the right people and develop ways of working with the technology.
Is there anything else you wanted to say about Where We Meet?
Due to the immersive nature of the show, we quickly realised that none of the traditional guidelines in theatres work, that the guidelines for accessibility don’t work with the show, which is very reliant on audio in the round, and for people to be walking around for thirty minutes. So, we are going to be using the next six months to work through accessibility options for the D/deaf community, for those with physical and movement disabilities and those with sensitivity issues.
The performances as The Cockpit Theatre will actually be the beginning of this process, as we will be evaluating where we are now and potential options for developing, such as interfacing with assistive technology. We can actually connect to hearing aids directly potentially for example, and we are also going to look at what we need to do with the actually accessibility of the journey, where we need to provide more information for people about coming to the performances and such.
It will be really interesting to see where the project evolves thanks to this. In six months we are hoping to put out a white paper and guidelines for this sort of interactive performance.
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