Technology has had an impact on the performing arts for years, transforming the ways of creating. The Mercat de les Flors, as a center immersed in contemporaneity, is now fully immersed in these new dynamics by Konic Thtr and Instituto Stocos, two of the best Spanish companies in the combination of art and science to close its 2021 season /22.
As part of the small series Dance and technology, Intel·ligències multiples In–Exo Corpòries and Embodied machine, respectively, will arrive at the Barcelona arts center to explore the frontiers between these disciplines, coinciding with the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), which this year hosts Barcelona.
“Languages for creating dance at a distance are still lacking, there is still a lot of ignorance,” notes Rosa Sánchez, stage director and playwright of Intel·ligències multiples In–Exo Corpòries, which will be performed from Thursday 9 to Saturday 11 June. Thus, the piece by Konic Thtr aims to "generate languages of the interconnection of the body with new technologies", using up to four devices to stage the dramaturgical and choreographic journey carried out by the company.
Although it represents "one more challenge of the scenic composition that Konic tackles", according to Sánchez, the creation follows his previous lines of research to examine "the landscape within the body and the body within the landscape", in an attempt to propose a more landscape of the world.
For its part, Embodied machine, which will be presented at the Mercat on June 11 and 12, is an experiment by the Stocos Institute that has won a Marie Curie Fellowship, culminating in a stage piece after two years of research.
To what extent can the machine be at the service of the body? How to endow technology with life and agency? How to synthesize light and sound in movement? These are some of the questions that Muriel Romero, choreographer and dancer, and Pablo Palacio, musical composer, intend to answer through this work. "It is a call for artificial intelligence to serve as an amplification of the body, since we come from years where the body has been reduced," says Romero.
Although in different ways, both companies try to find a balance between dance and technology, because the real risk of dance lies in representing years of research in an ephemeral piece.
