One of the most internationally renowned artists at the crossroad of choregraphy and technology, Gilles Jobin has been exploring the “Territoires Digitaux” of dance long before COVID profoundly impacted the world of performing arts.
With works featured at major immersive events – such as the Venice Film Festival, Sundance, SIFA and others – crossing oceans and captivating diverse venues, his approach to distribution is now a key reference in the immersive sector’s discussions on the topic, alongside his innovative and impressive use of motion capture in performances.
The decision to separate the company’s creative and production activities from those dedicated to supporting the community of creators through Studio 44 MocapLab stems from the desire of Cie Gilles Jobin to offer this deep expertise to artists who request it.
We met with Gilles and the lead dancer of Cie Gilles Jobin, now also in charge of the Studio 44 MocapLab Susana Panadés Diaz, in Geneva, where Studio 44 MocapLab is based, during GIFF 2024. This is what they shared with us about their latest project.
Cover: recording of ANOUSCHKA AND THE BRAID OF TIME (Los Angeles) Projet AR, Tamara Shogaoulu / Ado Ato Productions, at Studio 44 MocapLab, Joyce Ekomo et Ivan Larson
Dance and Technology
GILLES JOBIN – There’s always been a close relationship between dance and technology. The American dancer and choreographer Loie Fuller was a pioneer in modern dance, experimenting with electricity – a transformative new technology in the late 1800s. She created innovative dance pieces with colored lights, but she was also a technologist, an experimentalist and a researcher. She had her own studio in Paris where she developed and patented theatrical lighting equipment and even collaborated with the scientist Marie Curie.
Closer to us, the highly influential figure in postmodern dance, Merce Cunningham, was a pioneer in video art in the 1970s. Then in the late ’80s, he used the animation software LifeForms to compose “impossible” dance sequences. He was 70 years old when he famously said, “Computers are the future of dance.”
The perfect canvas for visual and stage technology
G. J. – If the “choreographic language” is abstract, the dancer’s body is very concrete! Choreographers create meaning in movement, but without “narration”, which makes their pieces a perfect canvas for visual and stage technology.
Since the 80s, we’ve seen the rise of Dance Tech as a new genre in contemporary dance. Back then, the tools were rudimentary and needed expert knowledge – and a lot of patience! In recent years, powerful processors, digital tools, and game engines have allowed artists to use 3D technology in real time with unprecedented fluidity of movement and graphic rendering. For Susana and myself, discovering motion capture (mocap) in 2015 and the ability to animate avatars in real time totally blew our minds. We had to use this in our creations!
Discovering motion capture
G. J. – Motion capture isn’t exactly new. Qualysis, the Swedish camera maker that equips our Studio 44 MocapLab, has been around for over 30 years.
But it is only recently, thanks to today’s processors and graphic cards, that motion capture systems can render high-quality graphics in real time inside a 3D engine such as Unity or Unreal Engine. Today, with a mocap system and a game engine, a dancer can enter the digital world and literally teleport its body inside of a video game, and in real time.
The modern dancers of the sixties were “space explorers”: in New York they danced on the roofs of the buildings, in art galleries, in the parks and on the streets. They relocated their dances into new available spaces, away from the traditional frontal situation in a theater. Within the digitalization of the arts, the art of movement is the last of the performing arts to join the digital revolution. We had to wait for today’s powerful processors to be able to render 3D in real time with fluidity.
Susana and I have danced on stage for many years, and we felt that those transformative technologies were an opportunity to reinvent ourselves as artists, augment our dance and explore the new digital territories for dance. We started working with digital creation in 2015, and when COVID arrived in 2020 and shook our world, we decided to dive even deeper. From the first lockdown we choose to go full digital, developing digital tools to collaborate at a distance or perform digital contemporary dance pieces from our Geneva studio without traveling, while progressively equipping our studio with a full optical mocap system and a digital suite for creation.
From the start, we envisioned Studio 44 MocapLab as a space for digital technology from a performing arts and movement perspective. Led by artists for artists, our studio aims at creating an environment that combines movement skills, stage skill, and digital skills for the creation of high quality hybrid performances.
A space run by artists for artists
G. J. – Not many artists or dance companies develop their own technology in-house. The usual approach is to collaborate with a studio or a tech startup. But we soon realized that we had a very specific artistic approach and different priorities.
When our tech partner for VR_I sold the exclusive license of the tech we were using, after only 3 years of exploitation – at the time it was the most touring LBE immersive piece in the world – we understood that we needed to be fully autonomous and create our own pipeline and manage our own equipment and tech. We imagined a studio space run by artists for artists, not for profit and dedicated to creation with a regular team of dancers and technologists.
When in 2020 we started actively creating LIVE digital pieces under mocap, we needed our own mocap equipment as well. We spent long hours in the system during rehearsals, but also, with the global diffusion of pieces like COSMOGONY, we needed unusual access to the studio itself. A live show of COSMOGONY at 7pm at The Music Center in Los Angeles means a performance at 4 o’clock in the morning the next day in Geneva!
At first, we equipped it for our own digital creations, but we soon realized that other artists could benefit from our hardware. The biggest financial hurdle for independent artists wanting to create digital work with motion capture is accessing the hardware. Mocap equipment is expensive, artists tend to optimize their time in the studio, leaving no time to experiment “in the volume” or over packing their session with too many scenes. Our space is not only offering a mocap space with 42 top of the range optical cameras but also a comfortable and inspiring dance studio, inhabited by artists on a daily basis, fully equipped for movement practice, motion capture, and digital creation.
R&D, Mentoring, Creative Mocap: the founding pillars of Studio 44 MocapLab
G. J. – Since 2016, and even more so since COVID, we’ve developed digital creations using motion capture in real time while welcoming artists in residence and organizing collaborative projects like VIRTUAL CROSSING.
After renovating the studio space in 2022 and with two years of experimenting with the new setup, we decided to give a new identity to Studio 44 MocapLab. Gilles Jobin Dance Company (Cie Gilles Jobin) being very active and creative, we realized that it became necessary to separate our own creations from what we do as a creative mocap studio dedicated to the larger creative community.
As artists and creators we also needed to acquire knowledge and experience, and welcoming artists’ residences helped us better understand the many possible uses of a mocap studio for creation. We now envision our studio as an open source hub for digital knowledge, from the point of view of the performing arts, with the goal to develop a local digital creative ecosystem of international level.
We finalized the studio’s equipment in 2022 with the support from the State of Geneva (Transformation Covid Program 2021-2022) and a grant for equipment by Loterie Romande while the City of Geneva handled the renovation of the space. Our close collaboration with Qualisys allowed us to work closely with their development teams to optimize our setup while providing them with client’s feedback.
In 2024, our position is very different from where we started using motion capture in 2016.
We’ve since created eight digital pieces, we welcomed local and international artists in residence, and explored the XR world of festivals, literally inventing a sustainable new diffusion that we call #tourwithouttraveling. We’ve gained valuable experience hosting artists and understanding the specifics of live digital performances in real time.
We now better understand the production pipeline and the needs of indie artists stepping into the digital realm and what kind of digital tools they might need to develop their projects. So what we want is to offer a stimulating creative environment that goes beyond technology – or, as we often say, “find artistic solutions to technical problems.”
Digital creation is an artistic process requiring research, development, specific conceptual tools, and training. Creating an XR project is also a matter of resources – financial, human, and digital. The budgets for indie creation are very different from those in AAA video games, so we have to develop smart strategies to optimize the resources. Distribution is another challenge; we’ve seen digital creations being unsustainable due to the number of technicians needed to operate them for a live audience. As an international touring dance company, we always ask ourselves from the beginning: is our project sustainable for international diffusion? Can we effectively tour this piece? How many people do we need to run it? What size does the audience need to be to make it affordable for organizers? VR_I, our LBE piece for 5 spectators, created in 2017, traveled in presence in 41 cities in 24 countries and has been seen by more than 15’000 spectators… and we could have doubled these numbers if we were not cut off from the tech license after 3 years. COSMOGONY, created in 2021 for the SIFA festival in Singapore, has already visited 25 cities in the world without traveling and is still going strong.
To be continued…
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.