Daily TribuneUna Isla uses the wisdom of dance to show how cultures are conquered. It's advanced yet primal in the way it is constantly grounded on the concept of adaptation and survival.
Una Isla prompts contemplation on the complexities of our interactions with AI, and the ever-elusive quest for meaningful connections in an increasingly automated world.
Photo courtesy of Leafhopper
The collaborative performance art is not concerned with showcasing AI's potentials, but rather harnessing them to reinforce the work’s concept and poetics.
Photo courtesy of Leafhopper
Una Isla questions and blurs the lines between “us” and “others”, between human and machine, exploring themes of agency, identity, and coexistence in a digital world.
Photo courtesy of Leafhopper
Man is an island in Agrupacion Señor Serrano's Una Isla that recently unfolded at the Singapore International Festival of Arts like a weird dream you've been having lately.
A woman in a leotard suit caught in the drone of a seemingly endless loop of slight dance steps lends body to an onstage congress with AI.
There's a complex, excruciating psychology in the monotony of movement, the expressionless and repetitive features of a practically bare and insufferably silent stage: a prison where you momentarily find yourself trapped like a stoic sitting through the woman's forbidding existence.
The sense of pent-up foreboding constantly anticipated redemption that reflected back in real life about how the automation revolution has liberated humans from boredom and repetition.
The onstage conversation turned to an invitation to explore an island populated by AI-generated bizarre holographic sculptures morphing to a flurry of synthetic beats and busting a move.
A capsule suddenly materialized. Through the haze of radioactive waste and psychedelic spice one could see a legion stir: a slow club crowd gradually transformed by a staple DJ set to an orgy.
Outside the bubble, the woman's non-conformist dance refuses to sway, no matter the lure of the tribe's forward-flowing and funky bass lines as an appeal to partake in the ritual.
But to resist the trance of 80s synth pop was a moot point as the groove gradually flowed into her circuitry. All it took to surrender is to slip into the bubble and join the club.
It's a powwow discotheque bound by a set of rules where there are no rules. They didn't eat weird stuff, but they strutted, pranced and rolled the way you might in the great scramble to scratch a maddening itch you can't reach, or when you ate something spicy.
Una Isla uses the wisdom of dance to show how cultures are conquered. It's advanced yet primal in the way it is, against the vagaries of time, constantly grounded on the concept of adaptation and survival.
The woman has just began sucking up on her new robot overlords when there came another battle hymn heralding the arrival of another malevolent tribe, replete with neon T-shirts and goggles instead of ponies and swords. A new kind of disruptive funk.
Are they ready for war?
Instead of raging against machines, Una Isla waltzed with possibilities far from mechanical and fused choreography, live video, AI-generated music and holograms in what can be argued as one of the most riveting spectacles thus far at the Singapore International Festival of Arts.
It closed with a lot of open-ended questions, among them one that befits a collaborative carnival that pushes the envelope farther and farther each year to redefine the bounds of performance art: "What's next?"
