FreeSteps AR Yours
蘇威嘉 (SU Wei-chia)
FreeSteps AR Yours
2020
AR installation
Dimensions Variable
Courtesy of the artist
How to invite the audience to become part of dance, and see various dimensions of dancers as choreographers do? Moreover, how to create the audience’s individual perspective and fluidity of viewing experience? These are the initiatives of this project. And the further vision is, with updated viewing methods, we hope the audience can actively discover the aesthetic experience of dance within different surroundings. In most staged dance performances, choreographing a movement means the audience will lose the possibilities of viewing it from another angle. Because the audience can only locate one position at a time, introducing this new technology is one of the possibilities to break through this limit. We hope this can provoke the public’s interest in dance and lead them into theaters to experience dance, energy and connection in real life.
“FreeSteps AR Yours” is the work of the seventh year in Su Wei-Chia’s decade-long choreography project. From the aspect of technology, Su contemplates the possibilities of relationships between performing and viewing in modern dance. With the assistance of surround filming technology, instead of 3D virtual modelling, it records the most realistic movement of distinguished Taiwanese dancers. With mobile phone and augmented reality technology, the audience has the freedom to choose perspectives. We wish there will be new approaches to record dance, so that audience can view dance anytime, anywhere.
Artist description
Su Wei-Chia, who founded the HORSE Dance Theater in 2004, has been choreographed and performed for dance groups. In 2007, the collective work “Velocity” has won the 6th Taishin Performing Arts Award. In 2012, “2 MEN”, which is an autobiographical work collaborated with Chen Wu-Kang, won the 1st prize and Audience Award of Kurt Jooss Preis. From 2009 to 2013, invited by one of the greatest American ballet dancers Eliot Feld, Su joined Ballettech and became the guest dancer. In 2013, he started a ten-year choreography project called “FreeSteps” which explores the relationship between contours, movements, characters, rhythm, music, and light, pursue the delicacy and limit of body, and then lead the audience to give performers a variety of imagination and emotional connection. This performance was described as refining aesthetics to perfection. Despite dancing and producing, Su also takes the social responsibility as a dance worker and shares the joy of dance everywhere.