Stepping Into Machine
Born out of a pandemic crisis, Choreo Dance Film Festival (CDFF) celebrates the diversity of Choreomundus students and alumni by bringing together dance films around the world. CDFF is dedicated to promoting Dance as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and to bridge the gap between dance and film.
Synopsis
With the advent of cognitive automation services, an aesthetic and kinetic gap is inaugurated for human dancers. The presented case of the ‘bionic step’ is an illustration of how permeable dance cultures are to technological developments, and how these in turn have shaped a new canon for how movement is performed, across digital spaces and bodies/avatars; in front of our phones and while stepping into our machine selves. While machines keep progressing in their quest to understand ‘feelings’, they leave behind a trace of images and movement that are constantly reincorporated by human performers to engage in choreography as a medium, as a pledge and as an expression of faith, not in its spiritual sense, but as an action you take with your whole body to try to engage with another entity, a network, a consciousness or a device.
Producer – Jorge Poveda Yánez
Jorge Poveda Yánez is an interdisciplinary professional from Ecuador with formal training in Law and the Performing Arts, with an additional MA degree in Intangible Cultural Heritage and Dance Anthropology. For the past 13 years of professional experience, Jorge has strengthened his communicational, creative, theoretical and management skills through enriching periods as a civil servant, as a legal assistant, as a performer, cultural producer and as a young academic. After collaborating with Embodying Reconciliation – Colombia and working as a Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of Universidad Central del Ecuador, he became a full-time Ph.D. fellow at the Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies (S:PAM – IPEM) of Ghent University, thanks to the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
