ELEVENPLAY × Rhizomatiks
“border 2021” was a dance performance conducted by Rhizomatiks Research in collaboration with ELEVENPLAY, a dance company led by director-choreographer MIKIKO.
This uniquely immersive performance was experienced by audience members who donned VR headsets and were ferried amidst the dancers in personal mobility vehicles whose movements were fully pre-programmed.
“border 2021” was an extensive reworking of an earlier performance that was originally held in 2015. When “border” first debuted, we had to create all devices in-house, as there were no products or services available on the marketplace up to the task. However, recent advances in VR allowed us to significantly update the quality of the performance with high-resolution sound and audio, enabling the addition of many new elements to the performance.
In response to COVID-19, we made the work available online to complement the offline viewing experience, constructing a new model for expression compatible with both the real and virtual worlds.
The online viewing environment provided multiple viewpoints of the venue, allowing the viewer to freely select his or her own perspective.
In this way, “border 2021” experimentally blurred the boundaries between the fictional VR/AR and online worlds, grounded in the “reality” of the physical dancers.
Photo by hiroko hirota