A Body for Harnasie, 2024
Ben Cullen Williams and Wayne McGregor
Film, Installation, Performance
A Body for Harnasie, contains experimentations within the fundamentals of dance, combining filmed dance with new photographic and film material of the Tatra mountains – where Szymanowski’s Harnasie is set – alongside an emergent AI trained on hours of mountain footage which is accompanied by scans of the mountains that are mixed with motion data from the dancers. The work has originated from an analogue live dance, featuring a trio for two males and a female referencing the original protagonists from Szymanowski’s work. The end result is a fusion of creative action created through artificial and human intelligence, blurring the boundaries of what is reality and what is artificial.
A Body for Harnasie attempts to re-frame Szymanowski’s epic musical work for our times, to create a choreographic object that redefines dance in the concert hall with a physical kinetic sculpture in constant transformation through motion and artificial intelligence. Through this project, the traditional conventions of what is dance and what is space collapses as a new continuum of time emerges. What is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ blurs.
