Manifestations of Multimedia; Interactive Dance Performance
June 9, 2021, 6:30pm UTC+2
Teoma Naccarato
Dance, interaction, and virtuality in contemporary performance
Teoma Naccarato
The practice of ‘interactive’ dance performance is not easily defined in its temporal or geographic scope. Narratives that trace the role of multimedia in dance often centre a particular canon of European and American choreographers in the genres of ballet and (post)modern dance whose work has been archived and disseminated via video and motion capture technologies. From the late 20th Century to present day, the proliferation of portable and low-cost devices for recording and biosensing, in tandem with user-friendly software and social media platforms, has reconfigured access to and participation in so-called ‘interactive’ dance for artists and audiences world-round. In the context of the pandemic, myriad dance artists are turning to live-stream performance, devising distributed and durational choreographies that echo and expand on developments in multimedia performance since the mid 1960s. With this swell of virtual (dance) encounters, the urgency of questions related to presence, proximity, mediation and materiality is palpable. In this lecture, choreographer Teoma Naccarato interweaves contemporary practices and perspectives on bodies and technology in (post)digital dance performance.
Teoma Naccarato is an interdisciplinary artist/scholar working at the intersection of choreography, technology, and performance philosophy. Her works for stage, screen, installation, and page investigate the body and identity in digital culture. A key performer in her work is the heart: materially and metaphorically, the heart inspires questions about corporeal boundaries, agency, mediation, and representation. As a maker, thinker, and teacher, Naccarato embraces practices of care for difference, foregrounding tension as a source of innovation in cross-disciplinary creation and collaboration. Naccarato’s choreography has been presented internationally at venues such as SummerWorks (Toronto), Tangente Danse (Montreal), Rapid Pulse (Chicago), the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro (Montreal / Rio de Janeiro / Bogota), ReNew (Copenhagen), Lake Studios (Berlin), and HfMT (Hamburg). Recent publications are featured in peer reviewed journals such as Performance Research, Tempo, Leonardo, and Performance Philosophy. As a Visiting Professor in Dance at various universities, Naccarato has led undergraduate and graduate level courses in choreography, contemporary dance, intermedia performance, and screendance. Naccarato holds a PhD from the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University (2019), an MFA in Dance and Technology from the Ohio State University (2011), and a BFA in Dance from Concordia University (2004). Naccarato currently lives in Berlin with her cat, and zooms around the world on a daily basis.
