Digital Dance-theatre as a Multidimensional Romance Notes on the production of C8's Flatland

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Notes

¹ Atavism is the tendency to revert to an ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before. For instance, human beings growing tails might count as a far-fetched example. In this context, the return to embodiment and gesture takes us back to the atavism of guttural, proto-linguistic and gestural forms of communication amongst animals or even proto-humans. A future atavism, according to our theorisation, involves a means of communication in the digital era context that brings back gestural forms of nonverbal and bodily communication through many types of screened and mobile device interfaces, all of which rely increasingly on gesture detection and sound recognition.

² It is well known that Artaud coined the term “virtual reality” (1958: 49) to describe the virtual dimension of embodiment and embodied reality, which is comparable to his equally celebrated notion of the “body without organs”. Crucially, Artaud introduced the term virtual reality over fifty years before Jaron Lanier first used the same term in its computer-related sense.

³ The photographic camera is set on tripod shooting continuously, yet action is not frozen, as each frame is exposed for 2–3 seconds, thus accumulating in each fragment the longer duration that corresponds to a whole movement phrase.