Devolution: Dancing Robots on Stage

Posted 7 Feb 2006 at 14:05 UTC by The Swirling Brain

Choreographing a stage full of dancers is a bit of challenge. What to do? Better props? Better costumes? We could tie a rope to a dancer with a harness and swing them over the crowd? Riverdance was always a hit! Let's do something really special like that! How about this year we cross the Riverdance and Robots and get violent dancing robots on stage! Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre have incorporated robotic towering, ambulatory, geometric structures and smaller, swarming silvery creatures with spidery legs that perform as equal partners with the humans on stage. The show, called Devolution, is noisy, violent and artistic. It is a strange dancing collaboration of humans and robots. The software to make the robots move with the dancers is complex yet the machines can many times mimic the organic movement of humans. I'm imagining something like Riverdance and something noisy like Stomp, towering and artsy like Cirque Du Soleil with humans and robots.