Creative Concept

For nearly a decade and a half, Anarchy Dance Theatre has sought to explore how the body can coexist with technology in its works incorporating digital technology. Our previous work, CyborgEros, was a response to how humans navigate and reclaim themselves in the digital world, coming out just as AI and ChatGPT swept the world to transform humanity. Yet at this very moment, I withdrew into a period of post-creative reflection, hoping to let my mind take a break from all things tech-related.

I went to take a semester-long course on classical and quantum black holes at National Taiwan University’s Department of Physics by Pisin Chen, hoping to leave the human realm behind and wander into an imaginary cosmos, to understand the concepts of time and space in higher dimensions. In an intriguing twist, this echoed what we had long been exploring in our digital-based works—the discontinuity of time and space. In this process, I was struck by a sentence I came across in the literature on black holes and gravity: “The universe is digital.” 

I then reached out to Yu-tin Huang, a professor of astrophysics that I met by chance some years ago, to explore the connection between “the digital” and “the cosmos.” We compared our experience of working with discontinuities of time and space in digital media, and the discontinuities of spacetime in higher-dimensional universes. Through this process, we began constructing and rehearsing what it means to “step into the universe, ”using the body to reexamine our relationship with time and space.

Our exploration has been supported by the Future Vision Lab at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB), the NTU Center for the Arts, and Prof. Huang. Our goal is to understand how we might use our bodies’ perceptions and movements to reconstruct our relationship with the universe in a high-dimensional, fluid, and discontinuous world.

thewhole is not an exercise in mere philosophical abstraction. Rather, we transformed the physical equations of general relativity into a visual and kinetic experiment, using computer computation to simulate the imagery of black holes, with dancers’ bodies serving as triggers within this simulated system. Through motion sensing and real-time digital computation, every movement on stage becomes a parameter that feeds directly into the system. Thus, the dancer controls not just the visuals, but the forces of the black hole itself.

This work can be seen as a physical rehearsal for stepping into outer space, in which the audience can directly see how an abstract physical concept takes shape before their eyes. Beginning out of rational inquiry, this interdisciplinary collaboration culminates in a poetic reimagining of the “new body,” and has guided me to once again reflect on the profound connection between technology, humanity, and the cosmos, and rediscover ways for the body and technology to coexist.

Text by Hsieh Chieh-hua