For the seventh year in his decade-long choreography project, SU Wei-chia has once again explored out the distinctive contours of the NTT. In FreeSteps AR Yours, audiences use their tablets or smartphones as they walk freely within various spaces in the venue, while using augmented reality technology to see different dimensions of the dance.
In this work, SU continues his interest in exploring the body. With refined physicality and dance journey of six acclaimed Taiwanese dancers, the body landscape is delineated along selected curvatures in the NTT, each offering a different perspective of the dancers. With the help of digital technology, time and space are no longer limits, allowing the audience to freely traverse time and distance, spectating and performance.
Press
FreeSteps AR Yours extends the timeline, hoping to develop a new form which can better document the dancer’s body and the performance space and to make it more accessible to the greater public… “Viewing” as an artistic experience is no longer confined to the filming angles or selected shots, but provides a 360-degree documentation in terms of spectatorship.
Culture Express, June 2020
Journalist, Hung Tzu-Wei
As the spectators of FreeSteps AR Yours interact with their surroundings on an app to scan and detect to trigger the image, they also become a “technical individual” of a “human-machine body.” Therefore, the spectator’s physical participation is as much demanded as the choreographic strategy. The spectator has to rethink about their relation with the body modified by the surroundings (the AR dancer), and the participator will no longer depends on their feelings to experience as in the past, since by adopting the new technological object, the nature of the body has been changed as such that physicality creates a new participatory experience.