Digital dance: (dis)entangling human and technology

This thesis extrapolates from three exemplary practices of staged digital dance created with real-time interactive technology operating with motion-tracking software, to consider theoretically such practices’ destabilization of human-centered conventions in dance. Dance’s assumed heritage of human-centred conventions are those which set up a hierarchical mode of perception that positions the human performer at the center and the technology at the periphery of attention. This thesis theoretically challenges and elaborates on the notion of performance in order to 1) re-examine the role of technology in dance theory, by developing a framework of ‘technological performance’ that can account for the active contribution of technologies to the choreography itself 2) re-evaluate the relationship between the human performer and the technology as ‘interperformance,’ that is, as choreography that emerges from the interrelationship between two different kinds of performance: human and technological. The thesis concludes that staged digital dance marks an exemplary shift towards the post-human paradigm in dance, and offers up insights of interest to scholars invested in post-human dance practice theory.