Category: Latest Project

Becoming Hybrid

Becoming Hybrid

Over 92% of UK adults own a smartphone, and around 171 million people worldwide are using VR, with this appetite for new tech growing exponentially. Performing Arts is an early-adopting sector, due to the seemingly infinite creative possibilities offered by embracing and combining new technologies.

At this exciting time in performing arts, when emerging technologies are offering new ways to share ideas and really involve audiences, we invite you (artists,  producers, technologists, curators, academics) to join us in discussion and experimentation at this fast-growing intersection.

What is hybrid performance?

‘Hybrid’ is generally used to describe a performance experienced by both live and remote audiences, but at IJAD we see it more as the potential to interweave a variety of innovative digital options within the creative process. 

This offers a huge evolution of the ways narratives and artistic ideas can be developed and shared, leading to new forms and areas of experimentation: audience interaction in VR or by phone app, motion-capture, infrared tracking, with visuals and sound activated by movement, and more. 

Work with hybridity embedded into it from the outset considers the multitude of possible audience experiences: people using different devices, in different types of location, the level of WiFi connectivity, and the fact that people may be dipping in and out of the performance, behaving in ways unlike traditional theatre viewing.

Audience co-creation

The hybrid artist’s journey with audiences can start with co-creation, where artists employ various methods to engage audiences in creative, artistic activities, such as creative games, feedback, and giving artistic prompts. These lead to rich communication and unpredicted artistic outcomes, while offering audiences a creative opportunity. Online co-creation sessions between artist and audiences can inform a work’s trajectory at the R&D stage and also live, during performances.

In hybrid performance, audiences may be able to interact with performers, and with one another; in VR, either remotely or while in the physical audience; via phone apps, locally, nationally and globally; and affect outcomes and narratives, co-creating work as it happens. 

For example, in our latest festival of hybrid performing arts, OOTFest22, Pierre Engelhard’s Synchronicity used social media to request audience movement ideas. These recorded movements were then replicated by dancers in a live performance, in which the choreographies each generated a unique soundscape via the dancers’ body-worn motion-sensors in conjunction with generative music software. 

What are the benefits for audiences?

Hybrid performances offer something new and challenging, but it can be difficult for artists to connect with audiences while the use of creative technologies in performance remains outside the mainstream. If we want to bring our audiences along with us on the creative journey, we must consider what the benefits of hybrid performance are for them.

Democratisation of the arts

Co-creation using technologies can take many forms. This democratisation within the arts invites audiences to be actively engaged in choice-making, meaning ‘the artist’ is no longer sole creator of the work.

Remote connectedness

Hybridity can give audiences multiple ways to engage in the same performance. OOTFest22 saw Unwired Dance Theatre’s DISCORDANCE offer a choice of levels of immersion and participation, so remote and physically present audiences could either co-exist with the artists in the virtual environment, interacting there with live dancers in London and a dancer in New York, be virtually present in the VR space without interacting, or be physically in the audience, yet experiencing the results of other audience members’ interactions in VR.

Even audiences watching a hybrid performance live in a venue in the traditional way gain a sense of connection with the global others who may be virtually present in their various remote environments. At OOTFest22, the audience at London’s Rich Mix were in a sense remotely connected to the live audiences watching the livestream collectively at the Atelier de Melusine Gallery in France, and other remote viewers worldwide watching from home.

Becoming Post-Human?

Tech hybridity is already an accepted part of our daily life. We can pop into a VR playspace for a one hour game and go back to work, or put a headset on to experience a dance class, an immersive film, or have a meeting with colleagues across the globe. 

Is recording your thoughts and ideas on a tablet or a smartphone a hybrid act? Using an electronic hearing aid? A self-drive car? AI? It can be said that interactions between human and tech are merging us into post-human, hybrid beings.

By working with hybrid performing arts, we’re adding to this fascinating evolution, rethinking and re-imagining how technology can improve lives, in terms of health and access as well as entertainment. There are many people with difficulties of access due to physical, geographical, emotional or financial reasons, or caring responsibilities, who may not be able to attend physical performances and for whom hybrid work can open up creative and engagement possibilities.

Who knows, these hybrid explorations might help us push forward to new concepts of reality, new dimensions and understandings of time, space and matter! 

We invite you to join our journey into hybridity where access is open, lines are blurred between artist and audience, and we can be a global, mutually supporting network. 

Sign up to our newsletter and join the discussion, to evolve the performing arts via our upcoming Ideation Day, (Date TBC) round table and panel discussions, or joining our hands-on tech artist residency, or . . . . we are open to your suggestions. Let’s talk!

Let’s Talk!

We’re excited about where the combined possibilities can lead, and want to open up the conversation by sharing our ideas and experiences, and hearing about yours. 

Through our Open Online Theatre (OOT) artist residencies and Connective Matrix discussion forum, we’re exploring what hybridity offers in terms of creation, imagination and collaboration, and of course ways to keep the human aspect relevant.

Stats from:  Annual Survey on Consumer Attitudes Towards Technology

and             https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/us-virtual-augmented-reality-users-2021

Poster:Lionel Avignon

Photograher: Michelle Rose

Dancers: Nadine Elise, Phoebe Higgins, Gabby Sanders, Ed Elford.

#InfiniteReach

#InfiniteReach

Audiences, artists and performers: IJAD needs you!

 
For those who have been with us on this journey so far, you’ve
witnessed our new discoveries and the evolution in our themes and methods of creating and producing. We’ve been using social media to interact and collaborate with fellow performers and audiences alike, creating performances out of these interactions. And now we’re taking the level of collaboration up a notch, and we need your help. Read on to find out how…

 

For those of you who don’t know, we’ve been focussing on three ever evolving parallel universes:

 

·      The Personal

 

·      The Universe

 

·      The technology of sharing and interacting on the web

 
Interact with us


Where before we were asking for Tweets that would be incorporated into
our performances, today we are asking for your tweets to interact with
us, to inspire and effect and create the performance itself.

So whether you’re joining us again or new to IJAD, welcome to the
latest exploration in the In-Finite series…

 

 So what’s it all about?


In-Finite Space is all about, you guessed it, space. And space in all
its forms. For this performance we’re asking you to think about the
existence of 2 types of space and your relationship to it:

 

–       the space you experience as ‘personal’
–        the space we consider to be ‘the universe’
For example you might think of The Universe as gravity, the big bang
and the stars in the sky. By contrast, we experience a more personal,
perhaps more tangible type of space which is closer to our everyday
lives – the personal space we form in the buildings and rooms we live
in, or the space within our dreams… The third kind of space, the
digital one, is where we hope to see your imaginations at work. We
believe that the digital space we exist in can help us get closer to
imaging the other types of space… Through sharing ideas and creations.

 

 How can I get involved?

 

With IJAD the traditional one night stand performance is a thing of the past.

We’ll be having  the conversation from today! You can join us at any
time to give your creative ideas, or comment , or watch. Over the next month, we’ll choose a theme from the above and ask you to give us your take on it. You could send us a photo, write a
twitter poem, sketch or paint your response. We don’t mind what form
it comes in, as long as it’s original and produced in response to one
of our posts.

You’ll find the posts on facebook, twitter, Pinterest and Vine and you
can tag your response with #InFiniteReach.
To get you started here’s your first post, it falls under the theme of
The Universe:

 

A ripple from the past undulates away from my centre where all
memories are resting, into the extremity of my skin,
Manifesting itself through giggles, games, imagination a world filled
with fairy and astronauts dust, allowing me to take time and space to
recreate a new reality to my imagination.
We’ve also been working on a Pinterest board which you can follow here:
http://www.pinterest.com/ijad08/subjects-universspace/

 
 Need some inspiration? Last year we received this tweet:


@IJADdance
sky is
at the end
of my fingertips
As I reach upward
Where I stand
And finishes
eyes closed
in the far corner
of my imagination

 

 

and we danced this…..

 

 

 Who is IJAD?

We are a performance company dedicated to exploring new ways of
bringing audiences closer to our performances. Over the years we have
done this through digital technologies, live-streaming, photography,
durational and interactive performances. These days you’ll mostly find
us on one of our social media channels – Vineing, Pinning or Tweeting,
and of course, dancing!

We look forward to creating with you!