Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (STL) present the projects of the dance and technology residency MODINA.
From the stage, Liz Santoro recounts her life story through dance. Her childhood, ballet, New York, Paris, motherhood, the pieces she created with Pierre Godard. Except here, it’s impossible to untangle truth from fiction: some memories are real, others are generated by artificial intelligence. Some movements come from her body, others from an algorithm trained on her dancing.
This Is Unreal creates a hybrid world where the authentic and the synthetic contaminate each other. The music slides from romantic piano to algorithmic variations and pop music. It is an autobiographical pact gone awry — an autofiction for the age of deepfakes, a dizzying and unsettling game. Where does the body end? Where does the machine begin? And what if it’s precisely this indeterminacy that defines us today?
Pierre Godard is a French artist and performance maker with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Paris-Saclay University. With a background in applied mathematics and linguistic engineering, his research has focused on unsupervised word discovery and computational language documentation, particularly in low-resource languages. Beyond his academic pursuits, Godard is a prominent figure in the performing arts creating works with choreographer Liz Santoro that explore the intersection of dance, technology, and AI, pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance art. Their pieces have been showcased internationally, and Godard’s innovative approach continues to influence both the fields of AI and the arts.
Liz Santoro is an American choreographer and dancer with a background in neuroscience from Harvard University and professional training from the Boston Ballet School. Over her career, she has become known for her innovative works that blend movement with generative composition and technology. In collaboration with Pierre Godard, Santoro has created numerous acclaimed pieces that explore the intersection of dance and cognitive processes, presented extensively in Europe, North America and Asia. In addition to her choreographic works, Santoro’s artistic practice encompasses considerable pedagogical engagement through her curation, teaching, outreach, and mentoring.
Link: http://www.lpdi.org
The MODINA project is co-funded by the European Union.
