SURGE – Promoters
Experience, Interact, Play,
Hear and Feel the work from a different and unique perspective
SURGE DIGITAL is Tom Dale Company’s new work for 2021.
We are exploring the boundaries between the virtual and the real-world experience. We are harnessing the fields of human-computer interaction and VR technologies.
SURGE is highly experimental. An immersive dance experience, which the audience will experience rather than simply ‘watch’. We want to place you directly inside this world that explores dance and movement in its liminal spaces.
We want you to be able to interact with the shape and form the dancers take, and affect the soundscape you hear….from a completely unique perspective.
SURGE examines the theme of ‘digital human’ and follows a strand of interconnected TDC work we began with I INFINITE. Can we explore the “enhanced” capabilities of the digital human in a world beset by inequality? Growth and decay, harmony and discord – finding flow through fracture.
SURGE experiments with unnatural affinities across the dynamic range of human movement at the limits of human physicality and in an environment no longer bound by the rules of physics. Choreography in these liminal spaces takes on a new dimension as human physicality stretches to teleportation, bilocation, transformation, growth, impossible changes of scale, speed, strength, weight and flow. With an ability to magnify detail, create abstraction through the lens of perspective zooming in or out to micro or global perspectives. Physical materials can take on new movement properties, and the structures and the movement of things becomes as important as the movement of the body.
SURGE is being developed in association with theThe Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/mixedrealitylab/ and Confetti Institute of Design and Technology in Nottingham. https://confetti.ac.uk/about-confetti-nottingham/, with the support of the Quest Lab Network https://waynemcgregor.com/r-d/questlab-network
Humanity is pushing at the boundaries of evolution as we enter the augmented age. The digital world is on a quest to re-create life and does this by making ever more real copies of the world. Humans share the planet with the new life force – technology. We ask: “What is the future of the human body in a world beset by inequality…. as evolution/natural selection – is replaced by intelligent design?”
We are entering the SURGE phase. We inhabit an organic laboratory, a playground in a future that is grown not constructed, connected not isolated, where the body is the interface between our organic and digital futures.
