Robots on the dance stage

The Australian Dance Theatre's new show will feature prosthetic limbs, large-scale ambulating robotic creatures (some of them strapped to dancers) and a kinetic set and lighting design.

Devolution is a collaboration between Australian Dance Theatre and French-Canadian robotics artist Louis Philippe Demers.

"As performing entities, the robots are given equal status to the human bodies in the work, albeit with some major operational differences. I haven’t tried to conceptually separate robots and humans as different ‘species’ but have been interested in the collision and confluence of the two. Let’s see what happens when we collide these operating systems—that sort of thing. It’s as much an experiment in morphology and function as anything else," explains Australian Dance Theatre's artistic director, Garry Stewart.

Devolution highlights that for all of our technology we are still primitive, of the flesh and live as instinctive biological beings.

Devolution will debut on March 3rd at the 2006 Adelaide Festival of Arts.

Via robots.net. See also the Advertiser and The Age.