CoLab's guest Hellen Sky talks to Mark Webster of Mac-NZ

Australian digital choreographer Hellen Sky works as a performer, director and writer. Her work is interdisciplinary in that it bridges dance, performance, theatre and installation, using an evolving and extending engagement with new technology to carry out internationally recognised performances. These can (and have been) staged around the world.

Recently in New Zealand to present at the Artworks Theatre on Waiheke Island as part of a symposium run by CoLab, I asked Hellen what got her to the point she is currently at.

Hellen Sky started ballet when she was just three years old. Having worked her way through the Australian Ballet School, she found that the codified world of ballet got to a point at which she was no longer being satisfied. She found herself more at home at the Australian Performing Group (Aka Pram Factory), working in avant-garde theatre and Australian theatre, with puppets, set construction, community and physical performance, film and then with others from the collective.

Sky was a founding member of Circus Oz, after, working in rock ’n’ roll, women’s circus and stand-up comedy she returned to study dance and choreography at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Hellen Sky’s engagement with different kinetic performance and photography evolved. She became co-founder of the internationally recognised new media performance group, Company In Space, with John McCormick. Sky was a Fellow of the Australia Council Dance Fund and co-founder (and Artistic Director) of Dancehouse at the Centre for Moving Arts, Melbourne.

Increasingly, Sky was crossing over and interfacing into the world of art, and increasingly into the world of technological initiation, development and transmission.
Sky has lately been developing scores and technology systems that often use real time data generated by the human body to effect the relationship between multiple media to form total choreographies for live performance and installations.
Well known as a visionary in the field of performance/technology, she is fascinated by the possibilities of computer science to extend performance into other spaces – and even into multiple spaces simultaneously. The performances may be originated from yet another point altogether. These spaces may be separated by a few metres, or by thousands of kilometres.

Once upon a time, a performance lived in the moment. A performance took place, then hopefully lived on in the minds of audience members and the actors. The experiences may have been relayed by speech to non participants after the fact.
Eventually, performances were recorded – at first written about and described, then recorded audio-visually. Television and the movies gave these recordings (and the performances themselves) a hugely increased reach.

But a performance goes both ways. The audience sees the performance, but the performers are also aware – sometimes uncomfortably – of the members of the audience. This is of concern to performances extended into distant spaces.
Sky prefers the technology to be able to work both ways.

The ideas Hellen Sky has are often intimately connected with her knowledge of technology, and questioning technology in light of human evolution and culture. But as to whether those ideas are immediately able to be generated is another matter. Well known as a collaborator, it’s not only artists, performers, composers, designers and writers Sky works with, but also with scientists, architects, academics, interface designers and programmers.

These collaborators may be in Melbourne, or they may be in Dresden, Germany. Increasingly, that’s irrelevant, although Sky stresses the importance of place and the human involvement in it.

Currently, Hellen Sky is intrigued by the concepts of cloud computing, but retains a certain amount of scepticism. We joked that people retaining experience as memory and the passing on of experiences could be a human form of cloud computing.
Movement seems to be crucial to human thought, as the human brain evolved in our long nomadic phase. Does virtual movement give a human the same stimulus as real movement?

“Probably, or at least something like it. For example, my son once spent hours laying in a stranded boat staring at the clouds, listening to the waves lap …” She doubts he’d have the time or the interest to do that now, after getting a PlayStation, but she’s certain that virtual movement triggers similar types of cognition just as sports fans seem to get a modicum of a workout from watching their favourite sports.
This time last year Hellen was in Dresden as a guest presenter in Post Me New ID – *CYNETArt a collaboration of Trans Media Akademie, & Body Data Space (UK) held at Feistpielhaus, Hellerau, an extraordinary building designed collaboratively in 1911 by a team of architects, theatre designers and as a home for Jacque Delcroze, Eurythmics.

But she became intrigued by a derelict building on the edge of the ordered space she was supposed to be occupied with. In New Zealand late in 2009, Sky loved the feel of Auckland’s humidity on her skin. “At the moment, here [in Melbourne] it’s 39 degrees. It’s interesting what that does to people’s psyches.”

Sites have resonances, and can add or detract from events and performances. Milieu also impacts on memory and data retention.

Despite the powerful engagement with technology and despite the fact that what Sky does can push the boundaries of what tech can do, she finds the inbuilt obsolescence of modern devices irksome.

So how does technology touch the rest of her life? She says she’s a Mac girl, and at the moment looking for a way to backup and safeguard her large, digital body of work.

Sometimes the technology has to catch up with the vision. For example, at the moment Sky is intrigued by the idea of knitting fabrics, weaving patterns generated by her brain waves and other bio data. This way there is a transference from the performing body through the technology and back into something tangible and poetic. Knitting patterns ‘thoughtfully’.
I have no doubt she’ll figure out how to do it.

[Mark Webster talked to Hellen Sky in November and December 2009]

*CYNETart is an International festival based in Dresden, Germany that has since 1997 been showing new trends of cultural development in the media arts broaching issues of change of the perception of the body by new information technologies. Reflections on the impact of interfaces and different kinaesthetic vocabularies for performance and including projects which integrate art, science and media technology. Since 2000 it has been presented at Festpielhaus theatre, Hellerau.

Post Me_New ID 31stOct-2 Nov 08 is a Forum, in CYNETart_08 and one of a series of dynamic collaboration between body>data>space (London, UK), Eira (Lisbon, Portugal) CIANT (Prague, Czech Republic) and 16 international partners. It is co-produced by an international consortium of partners coming from Czech Republic, Germany, Slovenia and United Kingdom, within an action/research project of the same name, which focuses on the future of the body, and is co-financed by the European Commission under Culture 2007 programme.