Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre
Immersive Rumours: Hi Clemence! Thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about our Unwired Dance Theatre?
Clemence Debaig: My name is Clemence Debaig. I’m a bit of a weird mix between a dance artist, a technologist, and I also have a background as a UX designer. That leads me to making work at the intersection of dance and technology with a strong focus on immersive and participatory experiences, which is what I do with Unwired Dance Theatre.
The company was created in 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, because I needed an umbrella for my work that was beyond me as a person. I do a lot of work with collaborators, and I wanted to celebrate that rather than having things under my own name. We work across all sorts of tech - from VR and motion capture to haptics and spatial audio - anything that goes bleep bloop will usually trigger our curiosity. A lot of the common themes in our work are around empathy, sense of control, and how those two things sometimes are related. We’re questioning how technology affects us as humans and as a way of connecting with each other. Sometimes we have this illusion that technology is everywhere and we can communicate very easily, but we tend to forget how to empathise and connect with other humans.
IR: In 2020, when the company started, I imagine a lot of the work at that time was online?
Clemence: It was very remote in the work we were doing. Thankfully I have the technical skills to make work happen online - that was beyond just a Zoom performance. I’ve done quite a lot of work with telematics and having performers in different locations performing together. The first piece of work we did as Unwired as a company was called Remote Intimacy, where I had a dancer in London and one in New York, and I made these capacitive, haptic jackets where the dancers could touch and feel each other in real time from a distance. I made a whole performance around that. That was taking place remotely for the audience, but also remotely for the performers.
Remote Intimacy (2021) Photos: Unwired Dance Theatre
IR: Your latest show, Where We Meet, is at The Cockpit in Marylebone later this month. Can you tell us a bit about the ideas behind that show and what audiences who are attending can expect?
Clemence: Absolutely. The show started from this idea that we can never really know what's happening in someone's mind. Everyone's putting up a mask, and getting to the core of someone's inner world is very difficult. We wanted to use technology to give access to that and see if people could connect more easily when they had access to those inner thoughts.
For an audience, we like to say that we've invented telepathy. As people roam around the room, you have three dancers in the space, and the audience is invited to be part of the same space and wander around. It's very much a choose-your-own-adventure piece of work where you can decide to approach any of the three characters at any time. When you get close to them, you enter this sound bubble, and it gives you the feeling of entering their inner thoughts. As the work progresses, the dancers also have the ability to decide what they want to share through a device they're wearing on their arm. Through that, we then evolve the work to invite audiences into gentle moments of interaction, so that can be a little bit of gesture mirroring or meditation. We're not forcing anyone to dance! It's more about using your body as a human to interact, and that turns into this joyful, euphoric, communal experience.
IR: Across 2024, Where We Met was staged in a few different spaces around London. How has the show changed over the past 12 months?
Clemence: I'm going to go back a little bit because the work started in 2021. The concept was born out of an event called the Dansathon, which is a dance hackathon organised by Sadler's Wells, Maison de la Danse de Lyon, and Theatre de Liege in Belgium. People with different backgrounds would come in, but it was really about the idea of technologists and dancers coming together. We won the Grand Prize of the event, which gave us a little grant to start. We wanted to figure out a couple of things, both what we could do from a tech point of view, but also where we wanted to go from a dramaturgy point of view, and what other stories we wanted to tell with this set-up. The original three-day prototype we had was very much to show the mechanics more than dramaturgy. We wanted to develop the dramaturgy through the exploration of the tech and what it is enabling us to do.
We had several little R&Ds, then we got to present the first version at Maison de la Danse de Lyo in January 2023. That was only a two-character version of the show. We were using in-ear monitors to stream the audio from a central computer. We learnt a lot from that event and quickly realised that basically, we were never going to be able to tour the work if we carried on with that tech due to the cost of hiring equipment.
In 2024, I injected a little bit of funding into this from our own savings, and we started to re-engineer the work completely. We really wanted to own as much of the tech as possible so we could work more easily in rehearsal spaces. We're now working with very cheap tech, like secondhand Android devices rather than really expensive Sennheiser in-ear monitor systems. Based on that, it really allowed us to go back into the studio and work more with the material and go much further. We started by reworking the two characters we had from a choreographic point of view, led by Livia Massarelli, our co-director and choreographer. The writing by Emma Nuttall and music by Christina Karpodini were already absolutely gorgeous, so we started from that, but choreographically we needed more time in the studio.
We had an R&D with Rambert School of Dance, where we worked with an in-house psychologist, Kio Tomiyama, and we worked on the third character who focused a lot on perfectionism. Our third character is also male, so we needed to understand what the male perspective on perfectionism was too.
We first presented the three-character version of the show at Theatre Deli’s SHIFT+SPACE in June last year. We were particularly interested in revising our onboarding and outboarding of the work. Before that, we were onboarding people outside of the space, and it was very practical. It was very much like, ‘Do this, put this on your head.’. Now we've made it part of the work; it’s part of the audio, and there's a proper theatrical dramatic entrance with lights and all of that as you would expect. We also integrated a post-show section where we built a little decompression room where people can reflect after the show and come back to reality rather than being spat out of the space, and we're like, ‘Okay, go and take the tube again.’
Camden Fringe was the first time we had a seated observer version. So alongside the active participants, who can move around the space and get close to the dancers, the seated observers are given a tablet where they basically see a top-down view of the three dancers with circles. They can then virtually, with their fingers, move themselves around in the space. We were already very keen to explore and really just started scratching the surface of accessibility, especially from a mobility point of view. Could we offer an option for people who do not want or cannot stand in the space and move around the space for 30 minutes?
After that, we did City Fringe at Theatre Deli, Voila! Festival at The Questors Theatre and the Digital Body Festival that was in London as well, which is where we introduced a durational version of the work - which is an interesting one for festivals - especially in a more arts context where there might be other things happening in parallel and it's much harder to do small time slots. You need to have a lot of people coming through, so we’re experimenting with that, but we know it works.
We're always trying to figure out what's the best format/business model/conversation we can have with a potential venue or potential festival because touring very tech-enabled work is very difficult, so it’s a lot of learnings.
Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre
IR: I'd love to dig a little bit more into the three characters in the show. Do you mind telling us a bit about what's going on beneath the surface in all three of them, and the commonality between them?
Clemence: All three characters have a big duality of what is affecting them and the journey they're on to cope with it. They’re all sharing what they're struggling with, but also they're sharing how they're coping with it.
Faith is someone who is struggling with body image and has had issues with seeing herself in the mirror for years, looking at what genetics has brought in terms of the shape of her nose and the shape of her body. It's something she adores in her family, so she’d be looking at her Mum and adore her Mum’s nose but hate it on her. She has that kind of weird relationship with her body. In that journey of healing, she really takes the time to thank the body for allowing her to breathe and live to experience the world. A lot of the interactions that Faith offers to the audience are grounded meditation with a lot of visualisation exercises. There's one where you visualise yourself as a tree to retake ownership of the body, but not necessarily with an image of a body needing to have those properties. It's a way to experience the world around you and feel the air around your skin and so on.
Then we have Becki… Becki is seemingly a social butterfly. Very much someone who's going to suffer from FOMO. She appears to be a party girl, but inside suffers a lot from loneliness and really struggles to connect deeply with people. To fight that, she keeps surrounding herself with a lot of people and being the life of the party but is struggling a lot with a sense of loneliness, even when surrounded by others. The interactions she offers are about reconnecting with others and then taking time to really see each other.
Finally, we have Adam, who is kind of an executive machine. He comes from a family environment that expects a lot from him and for things to be done a certain way. He’s very much in this work-sleep-work-sleep pattern of trying to be the best and pushing boundaries but really is working towards letting go. There's a lot of interactions with Adam that are brushing off shoulders, shedding all that stress and anxiety, and then relearning to be present.
Even though those descriptions sound dark and intense, a lot of the characters are really on a journey of taking those struggles and coping, turning them into a positive outcome. The whole experience is actually really joyful and looks at how those challenges are just the vulnerabilities that are going to help us connect and turning it into a big celebration of each other.
IR: What have the audience reactions to the work been like in the previous outings of the show? I can imagine these topics being quite close to home for a lot of people.
Clemence: People are usually really touched in a joyful way, which sounds like a bit of a weird description, but people leave the space saying that they almost feel a bit hopeful for humanity and excited to then connect. We had people telling us that they were then on the tube afterwards and started talking to strangers.
We had people coming back as well, wanting to do the next show straight away because they’d related so much to one of the characters; they realised they hadn't given enough attention to the others, so they wanted to then spend a bit more time there. People who have resonated a lot with one specific character on a personal level say, ‘This is literally my story,’ but also say that while the other two might not be exactly what they're going through, they still empathised with them because they might know someone who is similar. There are always those points of connection.
A lot of the time people just stay afterwards to talk to the people who are in the room, which I think is quite beautiful. There's a lot of strangers in the space, and they're like, ‘I've done this interaction with you. I've been waving my hand in front of your face, so let's have a quick chat.’ It's quite nice.
Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre
IR: As you mentioned, the addition of the seated observer tickets is a recent change. Would you say that the audience takeaways from the experience are the same regardless of which ticket type you get or is it going to be a different experience if you were to go from the seated observer role over the active participant role?
Clemence: As a seated observer, you have a view on everything that's happening on stage. Sometimes you can see the three dancers dancing at the same time, which you might not see once you're in the action, so it's a different experience. We've had people be a bit nervous about participating and select seated observer first, and then once they see how much fun everyone is having, they’re like, ‘Oh, I wish I was in there,’ and then come back to be an active participant.
While the active participants might feel like they’ve got people observing them because they’ve got an audience, that's not what happens in reality because, thanks to our interactive projections, you're always in the dark. As you get closer to the dancers, the light comes into the dancer. You are always kept in the dark, and you're never stepping in the spotlight. As an active participant, you never become the point of attention for people who are observing. That's a nice way of protecting that level of intimacy and making sure that no one feels like they’ve become the show.
IR: That actually segues quite nicely into what I was about to ask, which is about the technology that is used in the show. Originally the lighting was very different and the audience would be more in the spotlight, right?
Clemence: Our original intention was to surround the group with the light. We have this squiggly line that's being projected onto the floor, and we wanted it to represent that level of intimacy and embracing people through the visuals. We realised that people, as soon as they noticed they were in the light, then thought they were doing something wrong. They thought they were getting too close to the dancers, and there was this feeling of, ‘Oh no, dancer, I'm not getting in the way. I'm not the show.’ So people were not getting close enough, and they were not hearing the monologues.
There's a lot of happy mistakes in the work, which I love. We were in a space that was a bit too small, and our projections were not as big as usual because we didn't have the ceiling height to get an image big enough. We ended up having that line landing between the audience and the performer and suddenly it worked so much better. We realised, talking to the audience afterwards, that for them, it was very natural that it becomes this flexible boundary.
The second happy mistake, we were in a space that was too small, but originally we had the performers really quite far from each other. You had to exit one thought and then enter the other one. When we were in that space that was too small, we had to put those sound zones a little bit closer to each other with a little bit of overlap. That's the thing that everyone absolutely adores - being able to stand in the middle of two characters. Because the sound is directional, you can hear one character in one ear and another character in another ear. I can see them from a distance when I'm managing the show; people are just standing in the middle and then listening to two monologues. There's something quite magical about that.
Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre
IR: Do you mind telling us a bit more about how audiences are tracked as they move around the space and how that impacts what they hear?
Clemence: So basically, we’re using a very similar system to what a VR system would use. We have a virtual scene with sound zones. Imagine in a game, let's say there's a little radio playing, and then you're hearing it very faintly from a distance, but as you approach, it gets louder. We can actually track that data; we can track people in that space as every audience member is wearing a tracker on their head, and we're feeding that back into the central system and into a virtual scene that goes back out to the phones hidden into the pouches audiences wear around their neck.
It's like you are virtually moving into that scene and getting closer to those positions. So we're leveraging a lot of the game engine and XR technologies. The whole product is running in Unity, and everything is kept in real time through this massive spaghetti of network messages, pretty much.
As well as affecting the audio, it also affects the lighting and projection. That data is going to be grabbed as it comes through the stage management system so that if you are getting closer to a dancer, the light will be affected. The dancers are also using phones - that's the device they have on their arms - and their decision is coming back to the stage management system and being broadcast to all the other devices. If they make a change, then everyone is affected in real time. [Read more about the technology used in Where We Meet here.]
IR: What do you think the main takeaway is that you would want audiences to have from the show?
Clemence: I want them to remember that connecting with others is a proactive kind of activity. We're going to connect more through vulnerabilities than through whatever superstar mask we're putting on and through pretending that we are pretty awesome. Basically the opposite of what we're doing on social media.
I want them to feel a bit hopeful about humanity and others. I think we are living in a complex, international, media-infused world at the moment, and having this little bubble of time where we can reconnect with others and have a bit of faith in reconnecting with other humans and the beauty of our differences. I know it sounds a bit cheesy when I describe it this way, but this is really what we're trying to do.
Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre
IR: Finally, what does the future hold for both Where We Meet, and Unwired Dance Theatre?
Clemence: We just got a bit of Arts Council funding, which has never happened before. The phase of the project is dedicated to accessibility. Due to the format of the show, there are a lot of traditional theatre guidelines that just don't apply. We want to really take the next six months as a big R&D to figure out how we do accessibility right for new immersive and XR formats.
We’re working with several accessibility consultants and also involving disabled participants in co-creation sessions where we'll be setting up the show and then doing some rapid prototyping in the space. I'm quite excited to maybe explore, I don't know, AR glasses for live captioning, which we've been talking to our Deaf consultant about the other day.
Beyond just the minimum of sharing the words, how do you share the feeling of the beautiful composition, maybe through haptic vests? There's a lot of additional visuals we can imagine. That's going to be really interesting. As part of that, we also want to collect our findings and then publish a white paper at the end of the process so we can expand this to the wider community.
To give you a quick example, we were trying to follow a relaxed performance format just to cater to people who might have sensorial needs. In our work, the darkness is what protects the audience, so we had put the lights a little bit up - as per traditional theatre approach for relaxed performances - and then suddenly everyone was super self-conscious and everyone hated it. It was just weird. Everyone was like, ‘I'm not going to move,’ and then no one was participating. We were like, ‘OK, we can't just take those guidelines. We're going to have to reinvent those a little bit and then see how it works’.
The Cockpit is our first milestone of research. We're going to have one performance that’ll be fully BSL interpreted. Because it's a choose-your-own-adventure, we're going to have one BSL interpreter per dancer so the participants can really switch around and then decide which character they want to engage with. This has already been really interesting because the interpreters need to sign in 360. They're in close proximity with the dancers, so suddenly the BSL best practices don’t work, and we have to go into the rehearsal space and try to figure this out together because it’s all new.
We’re also inviting participants into the space to then have a discussion with them afterwards to see if they've experienced it in a certain way and what are the new modalities we can imagine, and that will lead to a bit more prototyping. We have a partnership with the University of Kent in Chatham and then PROTO in Gateshead, who will host our upcoming workshops and sessions, so that's quite exciting. That's what we’ll be embarking on for the next few months.
Photos: Unwired Dance Theatre
Where We Meet runs at The Cockpit in Marylebone from 28th February to 2nd March 2025. Tickets are priced at £21.60 for active participants and £16.45 for seated observers. Accessibility information for Where We Meet is available here. To find out more, and book tickets visit thecockpit.org.uk
Comments