It’s hard to know what to expect when dancing with a robot. Sydney Skybetter, a choreographer and associate professor of theater arts and performance studies at Brown University, studies the nexus of dance and new technologies. Globe photographer Jonathan Wiggs and I visited his robot dance studio at the school’s Robotics Lab, where he brought students in his class “Choreodaemonics: Fleshy Bodies, Artificial Intelligences, Parasitical Performances.”
“Dancers and choreographers and roboticists and technologists are constantly thinking about design and how their work interfaces with other humans,” Sydney said. Their passions meet in choreorobotics.
The students had spent the semester sitting in a seminar room discussing theory. Now, they got to dance. I took a short video of Sydney and grad student Ivy He imitating the movements of Spot, a Boston Dynamics robotic quadruped. Spot has a lot of uses – the New York Police Department has a few of them. The societal implications of AI and robotics are huge, and Sydney’s work focuses on power dynamics and social and economic justice issues when tech meets human bodies. Here’s the Globe story.
I asked Ivy, a robotics student, whether Spot had the ability to really dance with someone – that is, be attuned and responsive to a dancer’s movements. She said no; the robotic dog is equipped with only a handful of sensors and cameras and generally operated with a remote. So no, Spot is nobody’s ideal dance partner. Yet.
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