Clemence Debaig, a trailblazing choreographer and co-founder of Unwired Dance Theatre, is redefining how we experience performance by blending her expertise in UX design with cutting-edge technology. From integrating telepresence and networked wearables to exploring the boundaries of empathy and human connection, her work challenges traditional notions of dance and interaction.

In this interview, Clemence discusses how her background in UX design influences her choreography, the challenges of merging dance with technology, and her vision for the future of virtual collaboration among dancers.

Nicolle:  How has your background in UX design influenced your approach to choreography and interactive performance?

Clemence: My background in UX design significantly influences my choreographic work in two main ways.

First, it's about integrating multiple components to enhance the experience. In UX design, I managed complex services where customer interactions spanned various channels and touchpoints. I apply the same principle to choreography, coordinating movement with music, technology, projections, dramaturgy, and lighting. I use tools like Journey Mapping, originally designed for UX, to map out and visualise the audience’s journey through performances and branching narratives.

Second, it's about the relationship with the audience. Creating interactive experiences involves understanding how people will react to prompts both individually and as a group. This mirrors the principles of interactive product design, focusing on usability and interaction. For instance, in our recent work with Unwired Dance Theatre's Where We Meet, we meticulously designed the audience's journey, including onboarding and interaction guidelines. This approach, akin to setting up the ‘Magic Circle’ in game design theory, involves iterative testing and user feedback to refine the experience, just as in UX design.

Nicolle: Can you describe some of the specific ways you incorporate telepresence and networked wearables into your performances with Unwired Dance Theatre?

Clemence: For Unwired Dance Theatre, the pandemic significantly influenced our use of telepresence and networked wearables, making telematics essential to our performances. We wanted to go beyond simple Zoom or live-stream shows and actively involve audiences. Our first telematics-based performance, STRINGS, allowed the audience to control a performer remotely. The setup included a performer wearing networked wearables with four haptic pods attached to different body parts. The audience, accessing a web app while watching the live stream, could decide which body part the dancer should move. The corresponding pod would vibrate, signalling the dancer to move that part.

This approach created a remote, communal experience, connecting audiences as they would be in a theatre, but through digital technology. Our next work, Remote Intimacy, connected two dancers in different locations—one in London and the other in New York—through custom-made jackets with capacitive sensors. These sensors allowed the dancers to touch and sense each other in real-time, establishing an intimate connection remotely. Our research evolved into Discordance, which explored social virtual reality spaces. This piece expanded communication beyond just the audience-dancer or dancer-dancer interaction, allowing both dancers and audiences to be co-present in a virtual space for more advanced interactions and participatory activities.

Nicolle: What are the key themes you explore in your work, particularly regarding technology’s impact on human behaviour?

Clemence: Most of the work I do tends to revolve around themes related to our ability to connect as human beings, and how the presence of technology influences the connection and our sense of empathy. The work taps into elements of intimacy and control- and reflects on whether we can empathise with someone on the other side of the screen. This can be when texting, interacting online, on social media or through the lens of AI– we are so remote from each other that we’re not able to empathise anymore.

During the performances, I like to introduce elements of ‘gamified humans’ i.e. if you are allowed to interact with another human in a gamified way through the performance and technology, will you take it as a game, or will you feel empathy for that person? To give you an example, in one of our earlier pieces of work, BOTHER, the audience was invited to put the performer in any emotional state that the system allows – this could be very negative emotions or very positive emotions.

The aesthetics looked very game-y on purpose, with two glowing buttons in front of the audience to press. It was so interesting to see how people would react. We found some people who were very familiar with games and would understand “Ok this is a game, I’m free to just mess around with this performer” whilst other people would be thinking “No wait, this is a human! I’m not comfortable putting this person into a negative emotion”. I like playing with the boundary of whether this is a social experiment, or is it a performance– and building up to a moment of realisation from the audience that this is questioning our sense of empathy.

Nicolle: In what ways does your experience as a dancer contribute to your work with motion capture technology and VR?

Clemence: Dance and motion capture work extremely well together, especially from a movement direction point of view. Dancers are very in tune with their bodies and are also very good at adjusting their movements to balance the limitations of the technology. For example, if the motion capture technology we’re using isn’t good enough at capturing shoulder movement, a dancer will know how to amplify that movement. They can read the output on screen and maintain a constant relationship between the image and what needs to happen in their body to match the intention of the movement. It’s a continuous dialogue with the technology.

We’ve also been using various forms of body tracking in social VR (eg VR Chat). As dancers, we’ve been trained to read other people’s body language. So when we started introducing new work in social VR, where the movement needs to be interpreted through the lens of a digital character, we also needed to understand how the audience can read that and how they are behaving or receiving the narrative we’re presenting. Being able to read body language and understand what can’t be conveyed in those virtual spaces, and what needs to be added creatively to convey emotion, was incredibly useful.

Nicolle: How do you integrate concepts of empathy and intimacy into your interactive and participatory experiences?

Clemence: In our latest work, Where We Meet, we wanted to use technology to encourage a sense of empathy differently. In this project, the technology allows the audience to hear the inner thoughts of the characters as they get close to them. They walk around and are tracked in space through motion capture. Depending on how close they are, the audience is entering a zone that gives them access to the inner world of the characters, enforcing the idea you can never really know what’s happening in someone’s mind. So again, we are challenging people’s perceptions of how to connect with others and how to be more empathetic.

Nicolle: What challenges have you faced when combining technology with dance, and how have you addressed them?

Clemence: Working with technology presents both challenges and opportunities. The first challenge involves the relationship with the body—wearable equipment affects movement and dance. In STRINGS, we spent significant time positioning the wearables to ensure they didn’t hinder the dancers and effectively conveyed haptic feedback from the audience. Experimentation and iteration with the technology are crucial, allowing us to refine the equipment to meet the choreography's needs.

Another challenge is understanding the limits of new, often unfinished technology. Consumer-facing tech, like virtual reality headsets, is rarely designed for dance. For instance, VR headsets are bulky and not ideal for dancing, but we explore ways to adapt them for storytelling. The third challenge involves the inherent risks of using cutting-edge technology in live performances. Traditional theatre tech is stable and reliable, but our innovative tools come with risks. For example, in Where We Meet, we use phones and tablets, which can crash mid-performance. To mitigate this, we’ve developed monitoring tools that allow another device to join and sync with the performance at any moment.

Finally, the process of working with tech is vastly different from working with movement. Tech development can take days, unlike the quick prototyping possible in the studio. This requires adopting new processes, where rehearsals are stop-and-start to accommodate the iterative nature of tech development, unlike the continuous workflow typical in traditional theatre.

Nicolle: As a lecturer and researcher at Goldsmiths University, how are you advancing the field of virtual collaboration among dancers?

Clemence: I am a researcher at Goldsmiths University, working on the Mocap Streamer project, which explores the potential of real-time motion capture for remote collaboration with dancers. Since 2018, our project has received several rounds of funding to understand how motion capture can be used for rehearsals, training, and performances. The pandemic significantly influenced our research, prompting creative exploration of this technology to enable remote rehearsals and performances. This led to the development of open-source software that allows live streaming of motion capture data, available on our website.

Through collaborations with dancers, we created a toolkit to explore human interaction in virtual spaces, both technically and academically. Initially, we experimented with abstract shapes, taking a visual artist's approach. However, we found that dancers struggled to connect and develop empathy in the virtual space. This insight led us to use more humanoid forms in the virtual environment, enabling dancers to connect at a human level, improvise together, and recognize each other’s movements. This shift has opened up new avenues for academic research, focusing on what is needed for dancers to connect genuinely in virtual spaces.

As Clemence continues to push the boundaries of interactive performance and virtual collaboration, her work stands as a testament to the powerful intersection of technology and human connection. By incorporating empathy, intimacy, and audience participation, she challenges us to reflect on how we engage with others in a tech-driven world. Whether through motion capture, telepresence, or immersive experiences, Debaig’s approach offers a new lens on the future of performance art, where the line between human and digital interaction becomes ever more fluid.

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Nicolle Knapova is a little bit of everything. She is a freelance translator, content creator and social media executive for The C Word Mag. She loves indie music and is always browsing through Spotify to find the next amazing artist to obsess over. Her love for storytelling means she’s always writing something and she’s not afraid of any genre. Her biggest dream is to be a published author. If she’s not writing her fan fiction, she’s writing her poetry and sharing it on her Instagram @elisecaverly.