Body Crysis/身體災變

Harrison Hall, Sam Mcgilp and Naxs Future

We are Harrison Hall – dancer/digital choreographer – and Dr Sam Mcgilp – media artist, representing Body Crysis/身體災變, a collaborative project with Taiwanese new media art collective Naxs Future. Our shared practice is multi-disciplinary, always centring the body in hybrid contemporary performance work with emerging technologies.

Harrison’s work situates contemporary performance and dance in experiential art environments, working to increase the embodied experience in mixed digital and live contexts. Harrison was a recipient of a Solitude1 Residency from Chunky Move and has been invited to TPAC’s ADAM Lab. In 2022, he was a recipient of the Chloe Munro AO Fellowship.

Sam is a media artist, working with new digital dramaturgies for performance. In 2021, he received a Creative Victoria Creator’s Fund grant to investigate how emerging technologies can empower new methodologies for collaboration. Body Crysis/身體災變 was substantially supported by this research.

Our recent collaborations are Running Machine (2022) for BLEED festival, Bonanza! (2020) and Body Crysis/身體災變 (2022). We won a green room award in 2020 for Bonanza!, which was presented at Melbourne International Film Festival. In 2023 Running Machine and Body Crysis have been nominated for three GRAs. We have also developed a shared practice in motion-capture, supporting other artists to create real-time motion capture works including Lu Yang’s Doku : the Binary World presented at ACMI and the Sydney Opera House.

    ABOUT THE PROJECT

    Body Crysis/身體災變 is an ongoing vanguard experiment in untethered performance for digital morphologies. A hybrid choreographic work with (re)animated bodies, stretching the bounds of our newfound digital corporeality. It has been nominated for two green room awards for Breaking Ground and Sound Design.

    Long time collaborators Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp teamed up with NAXS FUTURE, a Taipei-based media art collective, to present a hybrid live/digital dance work of impossible choreography, biomimicry and techno-morphology. Body Crysis/身體災變 transmutes dance, motion capture and CG animation into a simultaneous, shared performance between multiple sites in the flesh and online. First premiered simultaneously at The Substation (Melbourne), Ambi-SpaceOne (Taipei) and online, Body Crysis/身體災變 is the culmination of two years of experiments in motion capture and digital choreography.

    In its initial presentation, the Substation Main Space was transformed into an animated environment enveloped by projection. Three performers were motion-captured, allowing their movement to be applied to 3D avatars in real-time, dancing through a complex digital environment. Embracing the glitch, dancers move in states of shared embodiment with digital forms and each other. Body Crysis/身體災變 is decentralised and untethered. Performed synchronously in a Massive Multiplayer Online Game created by Naxs Future, while formidable quintet PrairieWWWW transmitted a live score and video of their performance in Taipei directly to The Substation.

    Body Crysis/身體災變 is a complex work at the vanguard of multi-disciplinary contemporary performance practice. It connects with audiences from disparate bases including dance, contemporary asian music, clubs, gaming and digital art. It has a modular form, which can be constructed and reconstructed in various combinations, always maintaining the multiplicity of experience that is core to the work. We are currently developing presentation modes for large-audiences, cinemas, VR and gaming contexts and music festivals in addition to contemporary performance contexts.

    Session Times
    PROFILE: Here’s What We Made
    Thursday 8 June, 10:00am & 5:30pm AEST

    CONTACT

    Sam Mcgilp
    contact.smcgilp@gmail.com