In this episode, Alyssa interviews Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson, co-founders and artistic directors of Slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performing duo. They discuss examples of how they have used technology in their performances, like the LED ring in their performance called empathy machine. They also discuss their artistic process, including how storytelling and collaboration applies to their work.
Transcript:
[Musical Introduction]
Alyssa: Hello, AMT Lab listeners, and welcome to another interview episode brought to you by the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer. In this episode, I chat with Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson, the co-founders and artistic directors of the multidisciplinary performance entity known as Slowdanger. We'll discuss some of the technology that they use in their performances, such as the LED ring in their performance called empathy machine. Plus, we'll discuss elements of their performances such as storytelling and collaboration. We hope you enjoy this episode, brought to you by AMT Lab.
[musical interlude]
Alyssa: Alright, so hello, AMT Lab listeners. My name is Alyssa Wroblewski and I am your Podcast Producer. Today we'll be sitting down and interviewing Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson, the co-founders of a multidisciplinary performance entity known as Slowdanger. So, if you can take a quick moment to introduce yourselves.
Anna: I'm Anna Thompson. I'm the Co-Artistic Director of Slowdanger.
Taylor: I'm Taylor Knight, I'm the other Co-Artistic Director of Slowdanger.
Alyssa: Excellent. So, tell us a little bit about how you met and how you formed Slowdanger.
Taylor: Sure. Anna and I both attended Point Park University as dance majors there. Um, and we were both collaborating and working with a company called The Pillow Project based in Point Breeze, and we became Facebook-kind of messenger pen pals, kind of post-graduation and I think we were always drawn to each other in school and the type of work each other was doing, but it wasn't till after we both graduated that we started working together. So, we started communicating a lot on Facebook, Anna invited me to be in some of these experimental films that she was making, and that was kind of, some of our first work together. And we just kept sharing mood boards and vision boards and decided that we wanted to start working together.
Anna: And I think that early work, it was just Taylor and I, and Anna Thompson, this was pre-Slowdanger. And we did several performance pieces where there was a lot of stillness involved, um, and we also started to experiment with ambient sound scores together to score those experimental films that we were making, and also to score these dance pieces that we started creating. And over time, we started to make more music. We had a friend that really encouraged us by giving us software to check out or other instruments to play with and as we started doing that, we formed the name Slowdanger, as at the time we're living in the East End and there are slow danger signs everywhere. And we thought that was a great name because we always felt that the work we created together was neither mine or Taylor's, it was something that we generated between us. So, we wanted to create an entity that described that. And we started using that as we've played out live, we started to play our music and dance in bars and clubs, in addition to galleries and proscenium venues. And I happened to be on a plane with a woman, um, I think it was, really recently after we called ourselves Slowdanger and she happened to be a brand ambassador for corporate entities and we started talking about the name and what it meant. And she was like, “Oh, it's great, Slowdanger: You're constructing from old forms, you're building upon old demolished surfaces”, and I was like what?! Putting that in the bio! And we had actually named ourselves that and now adopt that process that kind of comes from the construction atmosphere in all of our work.
Alyssa: Oh my goodness, that's an excellent story. Okay, so we're going to start off by talking a little bit about your art and your art form. So, according to the bio on your website, you use performance and collaborations to delve into circular life patterning such as effort, transformation, and death. And through this, you work with an engaged and deepening understanding of energy, synergy, action, gender, time, and storytelling. This last word in particular actually struck my attention. What sorts of stories or messages do you want to tell your audience?
Taylor: Yeah, I think Anna and I like to, when we are making work sometimes, and a lot of times we do, have specific narratives and stories that were inspired by to create the work. I also think it's important for us to leave a little, we'll leave it a little bit open so that there's interpretation from the audience member. Perhaps they'll develop a story that's a little different than ours, or they'll place themselves in their interpretation so that it feels more personalized to them and I enjoy that as well. But a lot of the work that we're looking at, I think, examines how humans, the human condition, and how we all relate to each other, and different circumstances. So that ontological examination of the body and being embodied and how our emotional states and our energetic states, um, affect our bodies, and also how our bodies relate to institutions, architecture, nature, shifts in the environment, social political shifts. So, the work typically ends up being pretty abstract, but there are a lot of very clear stories and narratives that drive it. But we like to deliver it in an abstract way because it's important for us to allow the audience to be able to enter the world that we're building and let it become visceral and something meaningful to them…so that they don't have to, quote unquote, “get it” the way we do, but that they get something and that they can, uh, live in that experience of the observation.
Anna: I think that allows us to fall back on a lot of archetypal imagery to create a structure that folks can then interpret their own story off of. Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah.
Alyssa: You know, that's interesting, because when I caught your guy's performance of empathy machine, I had a very similar experience that myself. I interpreted the story as one way and I was trying to interpret it as what might have been like the ‘one and only correct way’, but perhaps that's not the intention for the process of storytelling, perhaps it's more up to, like, each member of the audience to not only interpret the story as it is presented, but also interpret the story as per their experiences or, um, as they want to view it, or what kind of lesson they want to get from it.
Anna and Taylor both: Definitely.
Taylor: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I love that you had a very clear reaction and narrative to it, and to me, it's just as right as the narrative we use to deliver the story because, again, that idea of the human condition, we're all kind of living in these bodies and experiencing utilitarianism and all these things together, but our, our individuality and our unique-, uniqueness is what separates us. So, I really, I love when people approach us about the performances and they're like, “this is what it was about for me, this is the story I developed in my mind”, because I think that's kind of the purpose too, is to give people an opportunity to be creative themselves and shape the experience for themselves.
Alyssa: Excellent. Okay, so we're going to shift a little bit towards the technology side. So, your latest piece, empathy machine, which recently had a world premiere (at the time of this interview), features dancers, video sound design, and of course the LED light ring by your collaborator, Projectile Objects. For our audience, you can’t see what this looks like through the podcast episode, uh, this is a light ring that is comprised of two rings that hang above the dancers. Could you give us a few more ideas about the setup and how exactly it works?
Anna and Taylor: Sure.
Anna: So, the light ring is about 16 feet in diameter, and it's made up of just aluminum and LED strips that are kind of velcroed around the outer edge of the ring. There's also a centerpiece that operates as the eye of the ring because it is the place that houses the, the camera that actually allows for the ring to become interactive, as well as holds all the kind of technology and mechanics that allow for the ring to be powered and to receive information and to interpret it and to send it out.
Taylor: Yeah, I like to imagine it as a large chandelier. So, it hangs from a single point and as Anna was saying, that center part that looks like a pyramid houses all those electronic units and has LEDs as well. And then there's kind of these offshoot wires that hold the larger 16-foot diameter.
Anna: And essentially, when we started making this ring with ProjectileObjects, we were working on another project with another choreographer and were talking about how we wanted to build a lightweight, easy to tear down, easy to put up, lighting unit for our music tours. But once we started performing with the ring, we were really like this ring is almost like its own character, its own, has its own voice in the space, it transforms the space. So, we wanted to build a more focused dance performance work with it and conceptually, we started out with how do we move shadows and how do we make shadow a-, another character in the space as well?
Alyssa: Okay, excellent. So, another thing for our audience listening to the podcast, the LED lights flash, um, in pre-recorded different shades and colors around the dancers. But sometimes the lights even follow around the dancers’ movements. Did you go through an experimental process when working with the light ring?
Anna: Yes. So, Char Stiles worked with us on that element on writing all the code to get the ring to become interactive, basically, like writing the language of interactivity that we want to use. And that was a lot of trial and error, us talking about what we would imagine that would look like and then maybe finding out that that actually, in real life does a totally different thing. And we've-, she was able to basically hack, a very cheap security camera that uses infrared light to get spatial data and depth data from the performers underneath us.
Taylor: So those cameras, we actually have two cameras on the center part. One is the one Anna was describing, that’s emitting the infrared light, and the other is another just kind of, basic USB kind of security camera. And Char developed an app alongside the camera so that, like Anna was describing, the ring can respond to our motion in the space. But there was, as you were asking, a lot of experimentation with it because when you're working with technology, especially trying to use it in an unconventional or new way, all these new problems come up that you can't-, any, no one could predict. So, we were having some moments with latency where we would move and then there'd be like a second go by and then it would respond. And we were trying to narrow that gap as much as possible, which we-, Char was able to do. And also, just trying to figure out how do we work with this system. Its new, what kind of motion and movement and choreography gives it a type of response that we're looking for. So, there was a lot of processing. We had a week of process at the Studio for Creative Inquiry in Carnegie Mellon to be able to work with that technology. So, that really helped us leading up to the premiere to figure out kind of what was working and what we could use within the performance.
Anna: And what was also essential within our process period was that we had the ring in the space during rehearsals. So, it wasn't just us understanding language, the dancers in the process alongside us were developing ways of interacting with the ring.
Alyssa: Okay, so it sounds as if you may have already partially answered this question is not fully. But, if anyone, artist or arts manager-wise, wants to create a piece of technology that's very similar to this ring, what other things should they maybe be aware of?
Taylor: Well, I think they should be prepared for a lot of micro-failures. [Laughter] Which is a good thing because I think that answers questions, but just being open and being willing to work with the technology, especially if you're creating something new and developing software, just being open to taking time to learn it and allow it to kind of shape. So, not-, we kind of worked coincide, treated the ring and the technology as a character. So, we try to build a relationship with it. “Well, this is how it likes to respond. So, knowing that information, how can we use that to make a, a useful formation with the dancers or a useful pattern of movement?” So, just being prepared for the unexpected, really, because that's really what came up a lot for us.
Anna: I think you also have to be prepared to communicate [inaudible] to-, you have to be prepared to communicate across your medium and outside of your specialty and learn how to speak each other's language. Something that was really exciting that has been happening in all of our kind of col-, technical interdisciplinary collaborations is that we enter into their world and try to learn as much as we can about what they are doing. And often, they also come and are simultaneously taking our workshops and kind of becoming more embodied themselves, so that we're kind of really sharing the language and building the language of shared collaboration. But that can be really hard, and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of communication and it takes a lot of failure. The first iteration of the interactivity had computer learning mechanics involved in it and those mechanics learn from failure, but learn from failure so much so that we could not expect it, within the time that we had, to not go the way that it would be predicted in a performance scenario. So, we kind of had to shave that away because we were like, “it could just do what it wants, and I don't know if that's okay for this performance”. But I love the concept of learning through failure.
Alyssa: And you know, that's a perfect segue into my next question for you guys.
Anna: Yeah.
Alyssa: So, a very large part of what you do as well is collaboration because of course, Slowdanger is multidisciplinary, but you also combine collaboration with artists say, in 3D animation and 3D scans, video, computational art, but what do you think is the most important in including so many disciplines and collaborations within your work?
Anna and Taylor: Totally. [inaudible]
Taylor: Go ahead.
Anna: I think the future, in general, is intersectional and interdisciplinary, the future of art, the future feminism, the future of our world. We have to be able to exist within many overlapping circles, um, in order for us to really innovate and make change, and if we continue to come departmentalized ourselves, we will just box ourselves in and I think it further alienates ourselves from each other. So, we really like to be very malleable in how we collaborate with people and we have methodologies that we build through experience, but we don't always adhere strictly to those methodologies. If we are working in another frame, and we're realizing that this methodology isn't working, we have to find a new one. So, just listening to each other, listening to your own intuition and instinct in that space, I think is really important because then you make things that you never would have expected. You kind of obliterate your own box through the process of being malleable.
Taylor: And what we've seen that-, I mean coming from traditionally dance backgrounds, I think Anna and I were starting to notice that dance can be a very, I guess, kind of esoteric experience. A lot of people aren't used to going to see dance or they've already decided that maybe dance isn't something that they can understand, so they don't go. And working collaboratively, developing that communication, interdisciplinary as Anna was describing, has allowed us to be able to talk about dance in other ways, and creating more entry points for people, um, and creating more access. So, we're able to do, quote unquote, “our dance performances” in so many spaces other than just the theater or the studio. And I think a lot of that is due to the desire we have in collaboration and in multi-disciplinary processes. We are sound artists as well, so making music, we got booked for music shows. So, now we're doing our dance performances in dive bars and maybe that bar has never had a dance performance before, but I think without having collaboration with other mediums and other people, dance would continue as Anna was saying, “stay in a box”. And I think it's allowing the art fan to evolve and push because as dancers, we're working with a lot of, kind of invisible energies and stories that we're trying to make visible through our movement or through the worlds that we're creating on stage. So, being able to collaborate with other light installation artists or other sound designers, tech artists, we’re able to really bring that vision to another level that we can't do just the two of us.
Anna: I think it's also really expanded our audience and I get really excited when someone comes up to us after performance and it's like, “I never thought I would get or like dance but the way that you engage with different disciplines makes me feel like I can understand this”. And I feel like when I hear that I'm like, there, there is hope. [soft, happy laughter]
Taylor: And it strengthens our artistry. It allows us to think beyond the box of being traditionally trained dancers and it's allowed us to take our skills as dancers and go into other environments, like architecture students and computer science departments, to be able to talk about dance and find other ways to, to communicate and shared languages with, with people.
Alyssa: Absolutely. Myself, like I come from a strictly music background, so I haven't had too much experience with shows or even seeing shows like with different dances or different storytelling elements. So, for me, like, going to see empathy machine was really new, exciting experience in that regard. And, you know, I interpreted the story of empathy machine where the dancers at first were stuck inside the ring, or the machine, uh, they had masks on, and, of course, for our viewers, I won’t be giving away the story too much. [muffled laughter] But throughout the process, the dancers attempt to escape the ring. I'm curious as to the process of creating a story?
Anna: Yeah, so this story, we've been building this piece for over a year. It started out, um, as a series of solos, and then it became a duet that Taylor and myself toward to about seven different places. We also simultaneously did a 16-person installation piece called empathy machine that just dealt with the physical body, it didn't have any technological elements involved in it, and that was at Springboard Danse Montreal, in Montreal in 2018. And then we built a prelude section to this piece called VLX with the same cast, so a lot of our work is very iterative and we build larger pieces modularly through process, performance, and then putting it all together. And the stories started to come out of a recent in-process showing that we did where there was a bunch of playwrights that were invited, and we just started experimenting with the ring speaking like it does in the rin-, in the, like it does in the show where it's actually communicating with the dancers. And the playwrights who were in the room were super excited about that and wanted more of that throughout the whole piece. And we figured it also kind of generated this, this sci-fi storyline narrative, which is definitely what inspires the piece. It's very cinematic. We both love sci-fi movies. I read a lot of science fiction as a child through my father, who's super into it. So, that kind of brought the story into the piece, just through this longer process. We were inviting a lot of different people into the room… And after that, we worked with our friend Adil Mansoor who's a director, and actually a directing MFA candidate at CMU, who, um… We just-, honestly helped empower us to use language more intentionally, and to ask ourselves, why and what was happening in each insertion of language and communication in the piece.
Taylor: I think when we first initially were writing proposals and documenting, um, our language about what we wanted the piece to be, we cam-, kind of came in with an initial idea of looking at empathy and interpersonal communications between people and how technology has affected that, and the enmeshment of the human body with technology. And that's still, um, it's definitely a part of the work, but we saw as we were creating more images and more sections that there's a lot of microcosms of other statements, environmental statements. Identity and how people relate continued to come out in different ways. So, that process of rehearsal and creating is very influential, but also the process of performing really starts to feed the narrative and having these other dramaturgical lenses that Anna was describing allowed us- We had like this epiphany, we were in New York together and Anna and I sat down and wrote the rest of the story and we were like, “we figured it out!” Um, and that all comes from just this inner pers-, intersection of different minds and responding to different things. So, that's the, kept involved-, involving, influencing the narrative.
Anna: I think what we were also really afraid of was that the ring would just be seen as an aesthetic acc-, accessory in the piece. And since we were not considering it as such in the process, we had to make it more clear by, I think, giving a story to the ring and its relationship with the humans, cyborg dancers on stage. [Laughter]
Taylor: I think that clarity in personifying the ring and giving it a literal voice, we felt strong that that would help kind of show that, to us, it means more than just, “it's the sixth character in the piece” sense, not just the, the lighting source.
Anna: And that in building and living in a, in a continually enmeshed technological world, these technologies that we create are a reflection of humanity. They're not simply a foreign organism. So, we wanted to also show that this technology, maybe a long time ago, before these beings were trapped inside of it, were created by a human. So, to give it a more human-like kind of representation.
Alyssa: So what would be your dream technology to use in future works?
Taylor: Oh, hmm…
Anna: I think we like really loved working with the ring and we're still talking about a lot of ways we can make it better, um, and advance it into the future. We love-, right now we're working on another piece with another CMU Professor Robert Zacharias called resonant body that has been commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art in relationship with the Access and Ability Exhibit that's there (at the time of this interview), through our residency there this past summer. And this technology takes sensors that we wear on our body when we dance, that go into a MIDI interface that influences our sounds on our software, and then goes into a tactile object. So, our movements get rendered into vibration that the audience is then invited to be in contact with. And I think that comes from us considering how dance, which is a very ocular-centric art form, can be expanded through the senses in different ways. How can we allow for our audience to feel the movement, as opposed to just witness it? And then it opens it up to people that have varying abilities to be able to have multiple entry points into the work that we make.
Taylor: And I think a dream of mine lately, I've been thinking a lot about set design and this piece really allowed, prompted me to think more about large set structures. So, the technology of like hydraulics, this stuff gets really expensive, so this is like dream budget, dream, but be able to have, like, more moving set pieces, being able to really transform the actual architecture of the space we're in. Using hydraulics are using systems, mechanical systems that can move pieces of architecture around, is kind of a dream I've been thinking of.
Anna: Yeah.
Taylor: Which might be possible someday.
Anna: And something that we're always interested in is continually to enmesh our dance and sound practice. So, making works where our movement directly affects sound, or sound is influenced by movement, or a response of movement. So that's something we're always trying to explore and go deeper with. And we've done it in many different ways but I think with technology you really need, it's really helpful to be able to work with something and improve it over time.
Taylor: I think a goal we have is like biometric data, like being able to wear the sensors that can measure the temperature o-, temperature of our skin or brainwaves or our heartbeat, and that can affect another design element, like Anna was saying, like the music or the lights or the fog machine. So, it's another-, we're working on that too.
Anna: Yeah.
Alyssa: Okay, so a little bit on the management side. So, in addition to all sorts of different works, you also hold workshops and therapeutic classes. Could you tell us a little more about them and what inspired you to start them?
Taylor: Sure, yeah. Um, as a dancer going through college and trying to make a career, a lot of dancers start teaching because it's something that's always in need for people. I started guiding some improvisational workshops at a place called The Space Upstairs, I think that had to have been around 2012 or 2013. And Anna and I started teaching what we call Slowdanger Physical Integration classes. So, we saw, coming from a very traditional conservatory environment, we saw how powerful the art form of dance and moving and embodiment practice is, but how it's not always making its way to communities beyond dancers. So, we wanted to develop open level classes where if you've never had a dance class before in your life – maybe you danced when you were younger and you don't need more, maybe you are a professional dancer – where all those people could become an intersectional space and all those people can come together and move together and , um, 3examine their embodiment. And that has become therapeutic for a lot of people because it's allowed people to deal with different emotional states, it's allowed people to just physically become more available in their bodies. And we feel that that's really important because also, if, if someone's given a movement experience where they have a personal experience moving and feeling, this will be described as magic in our bodies, and we danced, and that also can extend to their viewership of art and their understanding of the art form too. And we think that it's very important to continue to provide, for ourselves, it's just an extension of our process together. Anna and I move in space together a lot and we just started inviting people into the room and talking to them, like we were talking to each other, and just guiding people through the classes and it's really… People keep coming back and it's means a lot to a lot of people. So, that is really special to us.
Anna: And I think it's something that is missing in a lot of our Western society,this space where people can non verbally process their emotions through their body, um, in a communal space as well. It's very rare outside of the dance field that we get to do that, and I feel like us as dancers who have grown up and eventually entered the professional sphere, we can be really selfish with our, our knowledge and only use it to teach each other. But I really feel lik- [inaudible] It is a responsibility of us to share this outside of our own sphere, again, with the intersectionality. Like, it is really important and people have profound experiences through that. And it's been very special to be able to have that community grow in Pittsburgh and eventually, we're n-, now we are doing it outside of Pittsburgh as well. It's become more of something that's grown much larger than we ever thought it would.
Alyssa: Excellent. Well, hey, thank you so much for joining us guys, it’s been a pleasure having you!
Anna and Taylor: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Alyssa: Not a problem. If you would like to check out more of Anna and Taylor’s work you may visit their website at www.slowdangerslowdanger.com.
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Thanks for listening to the Arts and Management and Technology Lab Podcast Series. You can read more on the intersection between the arts and technology at www.amt-lab.org. Or you can listen to more interviews and discussions and our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.
[Musical Outro]