digital dance
Small Stage is passionate about bringing technology and dance together to create innovative experiences.
Our goal is to reduce barriers by making live and digital dance more accessible to a wider audience and equipping artists with digital skills.
What is digital dance?
Digital Dance blends live and digital platforms to create powerful, Mixed Reality (MR) experiences. These experiences are designed to extend the life of new works and bring dance to new audiences.
Digital Dance integrates technology including Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and online platforms. We continue to use traditional theatrical tools, including projection, sound and lighting design.
What are we using technology in dance for?
Small Stage uses technology in the following key ways:
Create powerful dance experiences using new and innovative approaches and technologies, to better link dance, audiences and the community.
To ‘bust down the theatre walls’, by bringing dance out of traditional bricks-and-mortar venues, creating accessible outdoor dance events that allow a wide demographic to discover and interact with, in unexpected places and ways.
Reaching and initiating new audiences that are wide-ranging, youthful, diverse and representative of a public not frequently engaged in the arts and dance sector.
Building overall capacity within the sector, both through the incubation of new choreographic work and development of promising artists (both artistically and technically) through workshops, mentorships, and hands-on residencies; as well as cross sectoral collaborations and strategic partnerships, designed to build capacity in the dance community/sector.
research + development ~ timeline/history
2018 ~
AR (augmented reality) mobile app project ~
In Spring 2018, Small Stage prototyped our Augmented Reality mobile app with a student team at the Centre for Digital Media.
Check out our process, through the eyes of Seán Conroy the Creative Lead, VFX Artist and UX Design on the project.
In Winter 2018, Small Stage created our first augmented reality mobile app. It was created as a compliment to our live performance Winter’s Dance 2018 #onRobson.
Small Stage invited our audiences to come along on an adventure into augmented reality. This included three “Music Box Dancers”-
Hip Hop Steampunk Dancer on a pocket watch,
Tap Dancer on a Gramophone,
Contemporary Ballerina on a Jewelry Box.
Download our app on IOS + the apple store.
Print the snowflakes here, and use the app to make our Music box digital dancers come to life!
2019 ~
digital tool kit ~
In spring 2019, Small Stage dove deep into digital dance and created a DIGITAL TOOL KIT FOR CREATORS.
written by (Dr.) Patrick Parra Pennefather
virtual reality (VR)/360 project ~
In Winter 2019, Small Stage created our first Virtual Reality (VR) experiences to compliment Winter’s Dance 2019 #onRobson.
Small Stage invited our audiences to experience the 360 videos live - as projections at the event, and by releasing the visual effect content as YouTube 360 videos OR google glasses.
360 | VR - Snowdrift
Winter’s Dance 2019
360 | VR - Sugar plum fairy
Winter’s Dance 2019
360 | VR - Dance of the little swans
Winter’s Dance 2019
symposiums + conferences ~
delivered by (Dr.) Patrick Parra Pennefather
11-August, 2019 - SIGGRAPH, Birds of a Feather. Staging Mixed Reality Events, Los Angeles, USA **report on learnings from Small Stage activations.
19-June, 2019 - Fun Palace: Carnival of Mixed Reality, Curator, Artistic Director, Researcher. Centre for Digital Media, ASC Cybernetics Conference.Vancouver, Canada. The Fun Palace consisted of commissioning 11 interactive mixed reality installations to an international audience and was also the subject of research that was disseminated over a 3-year period at the ASC Cybernetics Conference, SIGGRAPH 2020 and ISEA 2022. International.**report on Small Stage interactive dance installation at the Fun Palace.
25- November, 2019 - Staging Mixed Reality Experiences in Public Spaces. Arts, Culture and Digital Transformation Summit. AR, VR, MR and the Fluidity of Reality in the Arts, Banff, Alberta. A presentation reinforcing the importance of designing reality for national and international theatre and dance producers. International. **Mixed Reality Augmented Reality integration with live activation Small Stage
**NOTE: Small Stage was the Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, BC from 2018-2019.
2020 ~
symposiums + conferences~
delivered by Julie-anne Saroyan
21-February, 2020 - The Creator / Technologist Relationship Mixed Reality Augmented Reality integration with live activation Small Stage
Mixed Reality Performance Symposium: UBC.
LINK to the presentation and discussion.
delivered by (Dr.) Patrick Parra Pennefather
21-February, 2020 - Sweeping Remarks About Staging A Mixed Reality Event, The Mixed Reality Performance Symposium, UBC, February. Keynote streamed nationally to present a typology of considerations when staging mixed reality events.
13-December, 2020 - Moderated Panel Discussion. Delivering Value at a Distance: Teaching and Learning Strategies, Challenges, and Solutions with Farhad Dastur (Kwantlen University) and Renee Franzwa (Unity 3D). EMBC Community of Practice hosted by Kwantlen University. Linking partnerships with Senior Product Manager at Live Learning Unity with a community of educators across Canada. International. **report on Small Stage culmination
academic paper ~
Reimagining the Audience-Dancer Relationship Through Mobile Augmented Reality.
In Multidisciplinary Perspectives on New Media Art (pp. 119-141). IGI Global. 75%. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-3669-8.ch006
ABSTRACT
The research and development of an augmented reality (AR) application for Vancouver-based dance company Small Stage challenged a team of students at a graduate digital media program to understand how AR might reinvent the audience-dancer relationship. This chapter will chronicle the AR and choreographic development process that occurred simultaneously. Based on the documentation of that process, a number of insights emerged that dance creators and AR developers may find useful when developing an AR experience as counterpart to a live dance production. These include (1) understanding the role of technology to support or disrupt the traditional use of a proscenium-based stage, (2) describing how AR can be used to augment an audience’s experience of dance, (3) integrating a motion capture pipeline to accelerate AR development to support the before and after experience of a public dance production.
Author’s:
Patrick Pennefather, University of British Columbia, Canada
Claudia Krebs, University of British Columbia, Canada
Julie-anne Saroyan, Small Stage, Canada
2021 ~
transformational models ~
Small Stage will scale up our projects to include more artists and ideas into our collaborations, expanding access to shared ideas and goals, while building our own expertise by harvesting our collaborators' experiences, viewpoints and requirements to expand our perspectives and directives.
symposiums + conferences ~
delivered by (Dr.) Patrick Parra Pennefather
16-September, 2021 - Integrating Emerging Technologies within Live Production Processes, Our Hybrid Future Symposium, Crimson Coast Dance. National. **report on live activation digital dance with small stage
17-December, 2021 - Disrupting established traditions with xR. Emerging Media Community of Practice. Panel discussion on the potential for immersive technologies to disrupt education, opera performance, and research. Local. **report on Digital Dance and Small Stage
