Panel: Future of Dance

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This roundtable brings together a diverse group of dance practitioners and scholars focusing on the transmedia flow of dance in the twenty-first century. The global pandemic offered an opportunity for dance to spearhead innovative transmedia formats that move fluidly across media boundaries, artistic genres, and geographical borders. Site-specificity, VR, and video games have influenced dance in multi-faceted ways, transporting audiences into an “otherworld.” Engaging with transmedia aesthetics through the lens of cross-border exchanges, transnational co-productions, and co-creations will offer deeper insights into the distributed mode of creative agency in our contemporary scene today which ventures away from a hegemonic framework. In doing so, we aim to contribute to new transmedia frameworks in situating dance studies today. Scrutinizing the media integrated into the live productions will lead outwards to a critical issue concerning media as place-making, as well as the intermedial affinities between dance and other remotely delivered performances in the here-and-now.

Lins Derry (Panel Chair) is an artist and designer working in the domains of human-computer interaction, data visualization, and choreography. The body is often her site for investigation and intervention in the realms of design and performance. Her current work explores how choreographic interfaces can increase the kinetic and spatial interactivity between humans and technological systems. In addition, she researches how scientific datasets can inspire humanitarian responses via a performative process that she calls data embodiment. As a principal researcher at Harvard metaLAB, Lins researches how choreographic interfaces and data embodiment can be developed toward both functional and aesthetic ends. In 2020, Lins graduated with distinction from the MDes, Technology program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to this, she performed professionally with dance companies based in New York, San Francisco, and Montréal, including José Navas/Compagnie Flak. With these companies, she had the opportunity to tour across North America, Europe, and Asia. Highlights included dancing at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Oslo Opera House. As a solo artist, she had the additional privilege of performing at Korea’s Modern Dance Festival and the Beijing Dance Festival via her platform, Linsdans.
linsderry.com/

Grisha Coleman works in areas of movement, digital media, and performance that engage creative forms in choreography, music composition, and human-centered computer interaction. She is a joint professor in Theatre and Art and Design at the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. Coleman’s research explores relationships among physiological, technological, and ecological systems and human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her fellowship project, The Movement Undercommons, reimagines the use of new mobile motion-capture technology to build a data repository of vernacular movement portraits that center on cocreating critical and often overlooked narratives emergent of movement patterns through animate, sonic, and sculptural treatment of movement data. Coleman earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist program, and the Surdna Foundation. She was previously a dancer with the acclaimed company Urban Bush Women and subsequently founded the music performance group Hot Mouth, which toured internationally and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. She was also an associate professor of movement, computation, and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University, with affiliations in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, the Design School, and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

Carly Lave is a current graduate student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Masters in Design Studies Mediums program ‘24. She holds a BA from Stanford University ‘15. She was previously an artist-in-residence and creative director at gamelab.berlin, where she directed live productions and films at the intersection of dance and XR technologies. She directed the award-winning works including PAAR (2022) that took Best VR Film at LA Film Fest in Nov ‘22 and was selected for Mammoth Film Festival March ‘23. It has been shown at twelve festivals globally in over five countries. She was an artist- in-residence with the Goethe Institute Germany (2020-2021) as the artistic director of the Golem-Labor, an international workshop series researching motion capture technology with dance. Carly Lave was a 2018-2019 US Fulbright Artist to Germany (affiliated with gamelab.berlin at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, in residency with Tanzfabrik Berlin) exploring dance styles with new immersive technologies. Through this, she directed the VR dancework Golem (2019), garnering awards for VR innovation from ADC Germany and CommAwards EU. She has been commissioned by the Maxim Gorki Theater, presented work at MutekSF, the Republica Digital Technology conference, and given lectures on dance with technology at Lüneberg University, Cottbus Technical University, and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She previously worked in San Francisco, California. Her work appeared in theatres including ODC SF, the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, Joe Goode Annex, and with residencies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance & Mark Foehringer Dance Project.
carlylave.com/

LROD comes from the borderland of El Paso, TX, and enters the third year as Interim Head of Dance and Lecturer in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University, Artistic Director of Harvard Dance Project, and core artist for Livable Futures. LROD is a recognized choreographer, filmmaker, mask maker, and new media designer. LROD’s mission crosses the borders we carry in co-creative spaces sharing radical tenderness with each moving body. LROD creates inclusive installations, surreal dance-works, and integrates emerging technology with care. LROD has been invited to the Joyce Theater, NYU/Steinhardt, Brown University, and Jacob’s Pillow to present and facilitate on advocacy, pedagogy, and technology with dance and movement-based practices. LROD is a former core member of La Pocha Nostra and has produced for The Harvard Dance Project, Whitman College, Awilda Rodriguez Lora at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Livable Futures, La Pocha Nostra, Taco Reparations Brigade, Base Experimental Arts + Space, Center for Contemporary Art (COCA), City Opera Ballet, Men in Dance, Boost Dance Festival, Converge Dance Festival. LROD has performed in works by NZShaw, La Pocha Nostra, Taco Reparations Brigade, Kyle Abraham, Sidra Bell, Deborah Wolf, Pat Graney, Wade Madsen, Spareworks.Dance, and Erison Dancers. LROD received their M.F.A. in Dance and Intermedia Studies from the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University, alongside a Graduate Minor in Latinx Studies. Visit www.lrod.space and livablefuturesnow.org for more.
lrod.space/

metaLAB is partnering with the Mahindra Humanities Center to sponsor the Transmedia Arts Seminar, chaired by metaLAB Principal Researcher, Magda Romanska, and an Affiliate, Ramona Mosse.