The Replacements
Premiere: Fall 2023
The Replacements (working title) is created from a process of futuring. This new collaborative work by Vancouver’s Company 605 is a dance in a continual state of becoming, built from divergent imaginings of where we are headed. Playing in the tone of minimalist science fiction, the piece exists in a peculiar world where conflicting possibilities and outcomes can overlap, and bizzare inhuman movement emerges. Six performers navigate simultaneous conjectures of what’s to come, each envisioning the future bodies they will inhabit to together shape the action of the whole group.
In this forecasting of ‘future self’, performers enter into states of rigourous movement qualities and impossible tasks that fragment and abstract perception of the body in space. Inspired by ideas around artificial intelligence, the choreography explores a mimicking of human motions. Action and thought are broken down into complex sequences, and rebuilt as procedures or an algorithm of steps. The result is an unnatural iteration of natural processes, with uncomfortable speeds, extreme body isolation, and segmented action, that combine to create a mechanical or digital body, replacing what were once innate human movements with something “other”.
The rehearsal process of creating this “digital body” references visuals that are typically only achievable with the use of camera and editing techniques seen on film, attempting to replicate and embody these effects in real life. In doing so, the piece utilizes disruption of time, skipping across it in forward and reverse, ramping speeds, glitching and freezing like a recording, or overlapping multiple “takes” to bend and reconstruct moments through rapid repetition of micro-variations. The performers’ timelines are pulled apart or offset, creating an ever-changing temporal world. Movement can become a live sketch, rapidly scribbling back and forth over their pathways through time, vibrating between various threads of potential outcomes.
Sound will exist within a similar process as the dance. Amplified and recorded natural diegetic sound will undergo subtle digital processing or alteration – warped or unsynced, etc – to move out of alignment with the expected audio experience. Just like the movement, with a multitude of tiny alterations, the natural sound world begins to disintegrate into a digitally augmented approximation. An additional soundtrack of distorted rhythms would emerge out of a soundscore of drone, electro-beats, and low frequency sound waves, playing into the dance as it unfolds.
As both sound and choreography attempt to question and blur ideas of “real” or “artificial”, the act of assembling future is exploring our precarious relationship to both certainty and the unknown, and an ability to rapidly change course. With this hyper-specific approach of aligning trajectories comes an overwhelming sense of “all possibility, all the time”. The Replacements is an experiment in conjuring multiple futures simultaneously, and asks how we might move there.
