Senses Places – Dance-Technology Workshop 3: organized by Pei-Jung Lee, Isabel Valverde, Todd Cochrane :: July 30, 2011; 1:00 – 5:00 pm :: Dance Studio, The Kenneth Myers Center, 74 Shortland Street, Auckland Central, New Zealand + in Second Life.

Senses Places is a dance-technology collaborative project creating a playful mixed reality performance environment for audience participation. The project stresses an integration of simultaneous local and remote connections, where participants and environments meet to generate a kinesthetic/ synesthetic engagement.

Tuning the audience participants into several whole body modes of physical-virtual body-body and body-environment interactions within a physical and virtual environment (Second Life©), Senses Places re-purposes recent Web 2.0- enabled game devices with a synergetic/ semantic approach to interface design. The interfaces include video and avatar mediations via Webcam, Wiimote©, and Kinect©, plus a biometric device.

Through an inclusive process engaging kinesthetic empathy, Senses Places deepens contemporary dance practices, such as contact improvisation and Butoh, interweaving Eastern-Western somatic based practices like Tai Chi, Yoga, Body-Mind Centering, Release, and Alexander Techniques. The improvisation evolves in a sharing of corporealised places, times and energies, encouraging a fuller experience of the moment.