Kathleen Hickey Presents at a2ru Conference
A dancer in a VR headset on stage with a projection of their body in front of them.
On November 15, 2024, Kathleen Hickey, Dance Lecturer, along with her collaborators Rory Willats, an independent director, devisor, and creative technologist, and Nicki Duval, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University in Film and Media Studies, presented a lecture/panel discussion at the 2024 a2ru conference, “Generate | Integrate” at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This three-day conference included some 20 panelists in 10 sessions focused on technology, the arts, and design. Hickey, Willats, and Duval presented reflections and lessons learned from their 2023 collaboration, The Embellished Gesture (Virtual or Not), a dance work featuring four dancers navigating online masculinities through choreographic exploration using VR, motion tracking technology, and live film projection that premiered at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Willats’s work examines the ways participants in virtual reality social environments navigate, manipulate, and re-make masculinity; additionally, his work explores how we figure the hybrid (digital/physical) body on the theatrical stage. Hickey’s choreographic work, rooted in feminist body politics, examines the expectations of society on female-identifying bodies and how those expectations play out in politics and on the stage. They set out to use motion tracking to combine the movement languages of choreographed physicality for dance and virtual reality gestures to explore the physical performance of gender in both physical and digital/virtual spaces. Duval built a sound score that emphasized the sounds of virtual and physical social and public spaces. Primarily repurposing found recordings, their score arose out of visceral sounds of masculinity, from the vulnerable (heavy breathing or sighing) to the more overtly violent or toxic (banging and knocking).
Hickey, Duval, and Willats present at a2ru.
Working for over six months to develop a piece that incorporated technology in unique ways while thousands of miles apart, Hickey, Willats, and Duvall learned much about how the intersections of funding and technology impact the creative process. The presentation at a2ru focused on using these insights to sketch a framework for critical engagement with emerging technology as artists in higher education.
Hickey and her colleagues shared that institutional structures for seeking and accessing funding can have an inordinate impact on the ability to successfully engage in integrating new technologies into artistic endeavor. At University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, Willats had access to infrared cameras, virtual reality headsets, video camera equipment, large video walls, a performance venue, a separate rehearsal venue, staffing for spaces, and funding to support travel for collaborators. This represents significant financial support (a value of well over $40,000) available for a single choreographic exploration, without which the work would not have been possible. Not all institutions have, or can make available, an investment of this size, severely limiting the ability of many choreographers and other artists from exploring technology integration.
Hickey, Willats, and Duval shared that not all artists working at academic institutions have the same access to funding support. Many universities have created unofficial caste systems where faculty face the same expectations for advancement and support—to be nationally relevant, to generate “cutting edge” work, to be prolific in the creation of new work—but only some have access to adequate funding to be successful in those ways. Intended or not, this can lead to atrophy in artistic exploration and potentially limiting the exploration of technology integration in creative projects as little more than technological R&D or technology marketing efforts.
According to Hickey and her colleagues, the technology itself also poses challenges to its successful integration in the artistic process. Often, technology is physical; for example, the VR headsets are cumbersome, and, in the real, physical space, they are very expensive blindfolds. Dancing in them increases the precarity of the dancers. While this can be engaging for an audience member—watching a dancer navigate the physical space with their attention on a virtual environment is thrilling because of the risk—it makes the creation process and the dancing itself challenging. Further, when the performer has to puppeteer the camera—when their movements drive the point of view of what is captured and projected, their choreography and responsibility to the work changes. They are removed from the performance.
The Embellished Gesture (Virtual or Not) proved to be an evening-length work tracing the relationship of technology from the point of view of the performers isolated by the technology, through the alienation of tracking data, and then back to the point of view of the performers through live video, masculine gestures, VR prep gestures, VR gestures, and choreography that manipulated these movements. The panel discussion about The Embellished Gesture (Virtual or Not) at a2ru explored the challenges and opportunities of integrating technologies in dance performance, concluding with a robust conversation surrounding the making of the work, the funding opportunities available to faculty in higher education and how title/rank impacts those opportunities, future opportunities for the project, and what successful collaboration between artists and technology looks like.
