As we are in PREMIERE going through the third and final year of the project we want to create a space for discussion and joint reflection among professionals of the performing arts navigating the digital field.
In the online discussion webinars, we will approach the practical and theoretical aspects of creating with digital media, encountering and interacting in virtual spaces, as well as retrieving and interpreting works from audiovisual archives.
It is also an opportunity for us to connect with our interlocutors, those of you who find interest in the project, to exchange ideas, and to create a network.
We aim to foreground artistic intelligence in the development of emerging technologies.
What is relevant or urgent? What is desired? Where do we need to focus our efforts? What are the social, ethical and practical scope and which are the limitations of AI and XR technologies?
During the webinar discussion, we wish to shape a framework of thinking through these questions, placing at the centre the semantic sensibility and constant social inquiries of the arts. Sharing and addressing the questions that have emerged during the project —and beyond— in these years of the digital era, is part of an effort to define the position from which we speak and work.
Register & join us in the online discussions in April 2025
The three sessions will be held online, free of charge, and will run for approximately 1.5 hours. Professionals from various fields of the performing arts who are involved in the project will introduce Premiere’s work on the topic and moderate the discussion with participants.
Discussion webinar I
Performance and archive: curatorship and mediation in the digital era
Friday, 4 April 2025
12:00 CET
Moderated by Ezequiel Santos (Vice President, Forum Dança; Lecturer, Faculty of Human Kinetics, University of Lisbon) and Gonçalo Amorim (Artistic Director, FITEI – Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressão Ibérica).
Featured guest: Hélia Marçal (Lecturer in History of Art, Materials, and Technology, University College London).
What can become an archive in performance in today’s digital condition? In this era of what the Memory Studies scholar Andrew Hoskins calls “hypermediatisation” (2016), the Derridean will to archive has led to various possibilities – some of which are brought by technological advancements that help us recontextualise experiences – as well as challenges to performing arts archives that are both technological and ontological in nature. This webinar will discuss those challenges and possibilities, while also unpacking some of the ways in which the digital is expanding ontologies, values, and signification, both in terms of the works themselves, but also their habitats and bodies of practice.
If performing arts archives are recognised as being multi-sited and distributed by different bodies – namely of those of the people who embody the practice of performing, archiving, and experiencing the work, and of the documents that provide snapshots of said practice – this webinar will especially welcome the reflections and methods of archivists, artists, programmers and users.
We hope to make this a kin-space that intentionally transgresses disciplinary boundaries by highlighting its different strata, and tries to find new ways of making the projects around the archive more participatory and invested with life.
We invite the audience to reflect and share on topics such as:
– methods and dialogues around the archive
– disciplinary intersections and expanded practices within, with, and of the archive
– the archive as a space of resonance and affection
– challenges of social metamorphosis, identities and the reflective value of the archive
Discussion webinar II
Hybrid dance and theatre co-creation, knowledge transmission and rehearsal in XR spaces
Thursday, 10 April 2025
14:00 CET
Moderated by Suzan Tunca (Head of ICK Academy, ICK Dans Amsterdam) and Depy Panga (Researcher, Argo Theatre).
In this webinar we will present two application scenarios of the Premiere VR Theater technologies developed by CYENS (Cyprus). Actors and dancers from ARGO (Athens) and ICK (Amsterdam) experimented with remote rehearsal and knowledge transmission in a VR space that enables a live encounter between performers from two different locations through live streaming.
Departing from these examples and experiences, we will discuss topics such as the co-existence of physical and virtual theatrical space and its implication for performing arts rehearsal and creation, self-and other perception of interacting dancers and actors, the role of the physical body in enabling “real” encounters in virtual spaces and the experience of the audience and directors as witnesses and visionaries of hybrid performative experiments.
Participants are warmly invited to contribute to the discussion with other topics of concern. Together, we aim to inform our collective imagination of potential future developments in hybrid performing arts that coalesce physical and virtual spaces, expanding and refracting performative surfaces yet to come.
Discussion webinar III
mēkhanḗ: Exploring Human-Machine relationship in the performing arts
Friday, 11 April 2025
16:00 CET
Moderated by Erik Lint (Head of IDlab, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University) and Pablo Palacio (artist, researcher, software developer, composer, Instituto Stocos)
In this webinar, we will deal with the challenges of integrating advanced cutting-edge technologies in creative processes in the performing arts. As part of the Premiere Project, a set of tools called AI Toolbox and Dance Creation Environment have been designed to support artists in their creative workflow.
We will discuss potential applications of technologies as a way to expand creativity and reflect on our creative processes, the tensions that may arise between machines and bodies, and how our creative freedom relates to machine learning models alongside more traditional generative approaches in the arts.