AI + Dance

May 2024

This video showcases a recent dance + CreativeAI collaboration completed in May 2024 after around ten meetings over six months. This performance lasts six minutes. It features three dancers and a digital art projection. I approached Robbie Button to experiment with combining dance and AI. Robbie Button was the center dancer. The other two dancers are Elena Bruce and Erin Co. I created the digital art projection using Creative AI. I filmed Robbie's dance and converted his dance into minimalistic dance animation using BlazePose, a 3D pose estimation model developed by Google in Unity. The resulting stick figure animation mimics the dancer, acting like a fourth dancer on the stage. Towards the end of the dance, Robbie turned towards the stick figure and started to dance with it.

The minimalist stick figures and dark backgrounds are chosen to essentialize dance. They reveal the changing positions of body joints and help audiences focus on the dancer's body and movements while reducing cognitive load. In addition, the stick figure's brightness adds to the piece's excitement. What's more, stick figures are also what dancers draw when they want to record their dance moves on paper! Sometimes, the stick figure glitches, causing the whole scene to jitter as if under the influence of shock waves, speaking to the idea of deviating from the norm underlying the theme of the performance.

This work explores two kinds of norms imposed on the dancer thematically. Firstly, as a young gay man, the dancer felt pressure of the gay gaze or the beauty standard of the mainstream gay culture. Secondly, the machine learning model will fail to detect the dancer's posture if he deviates too much from standard human body positions known to the machine learning model.

Overall, combining AI and dance enriches the meanings behind the work, revealing the limitations of the AI technology and the nature of dance. This enhances the emotional intensity, making the experience complex, immersive, memorable, and unique.