Copy is an interdisciplinary movement based installation exploring mimicry, duplication and degeneration. Integrating performers, live feed audio and video, and modified open source software, Copy proposes a collectively degenerative theatre experience by fragmenting, looping, and returning the subjective encounters and behaviors brought to the performance by audience members.

The work reorganizes conventions of theatre and lobby spaces, proposes a co-creation between both performers and viewers, and addresses the excessive duplication that is integral to the nature of our digital culture. Rather than a succession of predetermined imagery and movements, Copy is an ephemeral series of fragmented communications between bodies and screens. The choreography is a series of structures based on mirroring, palindromes, and Xeno’s paradoxes, while the exact movement of the dancers is determined by the viewing gestures and physical presence of the audience.

Created by Justine A. Chambers and Josh Hite

Created with…
Laura Avery
Ahmed Khalil
Molly McDermott
Deanna Peters
Jane Osborne
Katy Harris-McLeod
Vanessa Goodman
Meghan Goodman
Dennis Rosenfeld
James Proudfoot

Thank you: M. Simon Levin, Su-Feh Lee, Susan Elliott, Artemis Gordon, Lucille Pacey, Arts Umbrella, Ahmed Khalil, Erica Trivett, The Roundhouse Community Dancers, Tiffany Tregarthan, David Raymond, Sarah MacLachlan Music Outreach, Ann de la Hay, Craig Shervey, Flick Harrison, Marie Lopes, Matt Frankish and the Roundhouse technical crew.

Jean Baudrillard
Screened Out
1996

“Video, interactive screens, multimedia, the Internet, virtual reality – we are threatened on all sides by interactivity. What was separated in the past is now everywhere merged; distance is abolished in all things: between the sexes, between opposite poles, between stage and auditorium, between the protagonists of action, between subject and object, between the real and its double. And this confusion of terms, this collision of poles means that nowhere – in art, morality or politics – is there now any possibility of a moral judgment. With the abolition of distance – of the ‘pathos of the distance’ – everything becomes undecidable. And this is true even in the physical realm: when the receiver and the source of a transmission are too close together, a feedback effect ensues which scrambles the transmission waves; when an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time are too close together, this renders the event undecidable and virtual, stripping it of its historical dimension and removing it from memory. Whether it is virtual technologies which create undecidability or our undecidable world which gives rise to these technologies is itself undecidable” p 176.

“Similarly, it is only with the strict separation of stage and auditorium that the spectator is a participant in his/her own right. Everything today conspires to abolish that separation: the spectator being brought into a user-friendly, interactive immersion. The apogee of the spectator or his/her end? When all are actors, there is no action any longer, no scene. The end of the aesthetic illusion” p 177.