PROVIDENCE — Students in Sydney Skybetter’s class “Choreodaemonics: Fleshy Bodies, Artificial Intelligences, Parasitical Performances” at Brown University spend a lot of time sitting and talking theory. But earlier this month, they visited Skybetter’s robot dance studio in the school’s computer science building to dance with Spot, a robotic quadruped made by Boston Dynamics.
Skybetter, a choreographer and associate professor of theater arts and performance studies, researches the nexus of dance and new technologies. The host of the podcast Dances with Robots and founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces recently spoke at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.
The class mimicked Spot’s stretching, stamping, and twisting.
“It felt like recess,” one student said.
Skybetter agreed. But there was more to it.
“Today,” he said, “we played with a surveillance tool.”
Where to find him: www.skybetter.org/
Age: 41
Originally from: Skybetter’s parents were peripatetic journalists.
“My parents’ superpower was to always find the ex-Soviet bloc ballet instructor no matter where in the country we were.”
Lives in: Providence
Specializes in: “Dancers and choreographers and roboticists and technologists are constantly thinking about design and how their work interfaces with other humans,” Skybetter said. Their passions meet in choreorobotics.
Often, emerging tech “comes from places and design priorities that are not in everybody’s interest,” he said. “When these AIs become embodied, when they perform, a lot of the tacit racism or ableism or misogyny of these technologized spaces becomes apparent.”
In contrast, as a choreographer he trained in contact improvisation. Participants are always in physical connection. The form, Skybetter said, “requires constant languaging around consent and power and flow and possibility.”
How he started: After the choreographer received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University, 9/11 and the 2008 recession made landing dance jobs difficult.
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“I had to find other forms of work,” Skybetter said, including starting a web design company. “I always was curious about the intersection of art and technology. I’ve always lived there on some level.”
What he makes: “I make articles, I make speeches, I make teaching plans. I make facilitation structures, I make code, I create space, I produce others, I curate. I work in collaboration and coalition. These are all choreographic phenomena. The nature of my work is centering bodies all day.”
The final frontier: “Dance is literally grounded in a particular orientation of our bodies relative to the planet. In space, let alone on the moon or on Mars, there are different gravitational thresholds that will totally architect what kinds of sociality and performance and culture are even physically possible. The next step is indeed microgravity choreorobotics.”
Advice for artists: “To play with these technologies is to be implicated in their development. Understand that implication. Managing your implication is itself a creative endeavor.”
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Instagram @cate.mcquaid.