Resume · Projects
Future-Historical Acting
· 2023
An interactive, virtual agent that hosts a wealth of historical acting technique, gestures and information, and can apply them dynamically.
It started with Ruddigore at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival: my director pointed me to Dr Dionysios Kyropoulos’s work, his research project Chironomia and his thesis on harnessing historical techniques to empower modern performers, as reference for his classical melodrama vision for the production. I saw an opportunity to interpret this work through my technical experience.
The idea:
- research seventeenth and eighteenth century movement and gesture acting techniques relevant to opera
- translate that research into a dataset of digital body pose and movement vocabulary
- create a language model that uses the dataset to associate choreography (visual) with lyrics (textual and audio)
- create an interactive agent of the model, as a tool and an art piece
Three facets: archiving (disparate historical sources in an open, interactive, unified system), teaching (exploring the techniques interactively), and creating (applying them computationally to new works). For the interaction I’m thinking of a brass planetarium meets Vitruvian man, to add a sense of “historical” to this “future”. The prototype moved from a Blender add-on to Unity VR.
I entered the project in the Choreographic Coding Lab (CCL #15, September 2023) and it was accepted, but I couldn’t make the travel work.
An interactive virtual agent that hosts historical acting gestures and technique and applies them dynamically: period gesture research into a pose dataset, a model associating choreography with lyrics, and a VR agent as tool and art piece