Staging digital bodies

Hilari, Johanna; Anderegg, Anna (March 2022). Staging digital bodies (Unpublished). In: The Pervasion of the DigitalStaging digital bodies. Universität Bern. 2.–3. März 2022.

For several years Anna Anderegg has been incorporating "the digital body" in her choreographic works, for which she closely collaborates with the dramaturge Johanna Hilari.
Hyperlink (2021) (a film made in Bangalore and Berlin) is for example an attempt to choreographically capture the absence and digital connection between two spatially separated performers. In the dance installation #homies (2018) three performers experience digital worlds and develop an interdependency to devices and virtual spaces. This installation is conceived as a loop and takes place inside an apartment, although the performers simultaneously animate the virtual space. The work reflects on digitization, virtuality as well as privacy and intimate spaces.
In #homies and in Alone Together (2021) the movement vocabulary is informed by the digital representations of gender, using the body as a tool to challenge established perceptions of normative social behaviors and hierarchies. While in #homies the focus lays in the connection to digital bodies or devices, in Alone Together it becomes the extension. The choreographic interplay between digital and corporeal body parts manifests into a hybrid body. Investigating narcotic distraction with technology, consumerism, and celebrity culture, the disconnectedness of the body, the computer as a mirror and the fragmented presence of the self is strongly decoded in the work.
Currently Anna and Johanna are working on the solo Hope/Me (working title, premiere 2023), which explores conceptions of ‘beauty’. The starting point for this research is the juxtaposition of physical and digital bodies, so that the aesthetics of the digital can be appropriated by the performer and questioned through dance.
For the workshop The pervasion of the digital we propose a talk, in which we discuss questions like: How does the pervasion of the digital form our concepts of the corporeal? How do digital representations of the body underline and/or subvert gender normativity? How can digital aesthetics be transposed to non-digital performances?

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