“And Now … !” we present four cyberformances and the Mobilise/Demobilise book, online and at Cultivation.Space in Berlin on:
Saturday 8th March 2025
18:00-20:00 CET (find your local time here)
The four performances are: Dance Plague by Organic Theatre; Nice Girls? by Annie Abrahams and Helen Varley Jamieson; The Backyard of Weird Creatures by Daniela Souza, Natália Macedo and Karina Senise; and Repose by Vicki Smith and collaborators. Scroll down for more information.
8 March is also International Women’s Day, and this event celebrates women’s creativity and women’s engagement in open source software development. UpStage was initiated by and has always been led by women, our development team is currently led by a woman, and most of the artists in these performances are women.
Repose is one of three cyberformances presented at the Mobilise/Demobilise festival and launch of the rebuilt UpStage platform in 2021. The performance explores the shifting geographies of the Whakatū/Nelson coastal edge by introducing the lethal Victorian practices of crinolines and the application of the Cartesian grid. Three billowing figures trace current and historic paths, creating a tidal strandline through urban infrastructure and flooding carparks.
The Backyard of Weird Creatures is crafted from the outputs of Chat GPT-4, DALL·E 2.0, Runway AI, and Plugger AI, and delves into the realm of generative AI. It asks whether Artificial Intelligence is a tool, an agent, or an active force in the creative process. Leaning into the imperfections and glitches of AI generated material the performance seeks to birth art from the peculiar and the unattractive.
Nice Girls? is a conversation between poetry and live text animation that problematises social expectations and behavioural concepts. As women we are trained to be nice, to pacify, to soothe; and to avoid conflict, even when this may not be a path to resolving it. Annie Abrahams and Helen Varley Jamieson’s inner rebels rise up and search for peace within conflict and poetry within paradoxes.
Dance Plague is a dopamine dressed danced promenade captured as a moving selfie through the ‘banal technology’ of a smartphone at Wilton’s Music Hall and at the Barbican Centre in London. The promenade is performed by two extravagant characters – Flanker Origami – accompanied by the Interlopers (Damn Fine Dance and Pam Woods). The performance explores the entanglement between hybrid and heightened performance practices and the materiality of bodies and places.
