A bone-dry choreography for dancers and AI-AVATARS opens the Holland Festival

It remains risky, public participation. Because what if the audience doesn’t want? Painful. Cyber ​​Subin From the Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun, ended a bit uncomfortable. In any case, not with enthusiastic, decisive and dancing spectators.

Cyber ​​Subin Was the opening performance of the Holland Festival on Wednesday. In the presence of King Willem Alexander and Queen Máxima, the kick -off took place in the Amsterdam Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. After speeches from festival director Emily Ansenk and associate artist Trajal Harrell, an ode was brought to the recently deceased Pierre Audi, the visionary director and former director of Holland Festival.

This was certainly not followed by no ‘tasty’ opening performance. At the basis of the choreography for four dancers and their Avatars is a computer model for ‘Human-AI-Dancing.’ Klunchun initially gained fame as a sublime performer of the Khon, a traditional Thai masper dance, but developed into a innovator of that age -old art. For Cyber ​​Subin (Cyberdrome) he sought collaboration with Pataranutaporn, a young scientist from the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The phases of their research project can be distinguished in the performance. In the first part, the computer is ‘fed’ with images of the 59 extremely precisely articulated postures of the KHON. They are then deconstructed, digitized and transferred to Avatars on the basis of six leading principles (for example circles and arches, body axes and the mutual ratio of limbs). This creates new, unknown movement combinations that can also be performed with variable flow and speed. Incidentally, it remains unclear what ‘speed sixty percent’ means. Sixty percent of what? As a result, the model gets something random for the viewer.

In the meantime, the Avatars are carrying out all the instructions well, but people simply have the limitation of his material body. That is the crux: underlying theme is the relationship of humans with AI. Are we going to follow and copy or will we continue to determine and think? In the last scene we see how the dancers always choose whether they follow the Avatars on the screen or not.

No matter how interesting on paper, as a dance performance it remains a bone -dry affair. A nerdy choreography with dancers who perform a postmodern, abstract choreography against the background of a projected control screen full of meters, diagrams and graphs. More a scientific project than an artistic product. It looks high-tech, but William Forsythe deconstructed the ballet in the eighties (without computers) and Merce Cunninghams already experimented with digital motion capture in the 1990s.

Amazing choice, this opening performance.

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