Zelia ZZ Tan | 2024 Research Trip
Switzerland | Dance
Dance
Nationality: China
Research trip location: TBD
Zelia ZZ Tan is a cross-disciplinary dance artist focusing on presence and identity. She is a pioneer in dance and technology in Asia who creates virtual and hybrid performances using motion capture, AR, VR, avatars, and other immersive technologies. Zelia graduated with first-class honors BFA in Dance from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts before joining City Contemporary Dance Company as a dancer from 2019 to 2023. As the founder of TechDanceLab, she works globally with masters like Gilles Jobin and Sasha Waltz. In 2022, her work “Accelerating Dimension”, with live mocap, avatars and audience interaction showed at the Phygital_D Festival in West Kowloon Cultural District. In Fall 2023, Zelia will begin pursuing her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in the United States as a double major in Interactive Media for Performance (Theatre) and Choreography (Dance), with financial support from the Asian Cultural Council.
Her research interest is in the future of the body, experience, and interaction. The core of her residency trip in Switzerland is to explore the interaction between the body and technology would generate a new perception of reality, for both the artists and the audience.
XR Dance is undoubtedly the medium of the future as it is a converging point of very many disciplines and computer and media technologies involved in its creation. Zelia observes the choreography of embodied identity may be the dialectic of the dance of the present age, questionable. Through a method that she describes as “invisible choreography”, as a dancer, digital maker, and artist, she was able to build trust in interdisciplinary collaboration and get a sense of what this hybrid reality experience was like for different people. Technologies invariably participate in the “making“ of the digital culture. (Stalder, 2016).
In Switzerland, Zelia hopes to realize more in-depth cultural exchanges and artistic experiments to create new ways of collaboration. The project is planned to use video, text, and multiple bodies as media. She will use discussion to empower interactions, creating immersive workshops for people’s identities emerging in the live virtual dance at the mocap lab and animation studio. She will do choreography experiments in the local theatres for hybrid dance and live improvisation, and more importantly, apply new methodologies beyond dance creation, to discover innovative performances and experiences.
(Photo by Lee Wai Leung)
