Infusing the human form with layers of technology, HYPER_ brings together two distinctly different worlds: 2D video projected through and onto a live performer’s 3D corporeality. Exploring our limits of perception by shifting the dimensionality of the body in relationship to the immersive screen, HYPER_ challenges our perception of reality. The performer’s physique is dissected and transformed, disappearing and merging with the stage and screen.

In HYPER_ the body is reduced, layer by layer, to its very root and structure – a dehumanizing process that creates a deep, surreal and supernatural effect. Animated by a series of transformations, layered and colourful, the body becomes our dreamscape.

Performer and creator Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who blends her formal training from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Winnipeg’s School of Contemporary Dancers, the University of Manitoba School of Art (performance art, video and theory studies), and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in New Media from the Transart Institute in Krems, Austria.

This is Freya's Canada Dance Festival debut. 

NOTE: The audience wears 3D Chromadepth glasses for sections of HYPER_. These Chromadepth glasses create a false sense of depth by isolating colour – red comes to the foreground and blue falls the furthest into the background; all other colours follow in order of the rainbow.

Development of HYPER_ was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council and the Video Pool Media Arts Centre, with production residencies at Studio 303 – Danse & Arts Indisciplinés (Montréal), Experimental Media and Performing Art Center (Troy, New York), Latitude 53 – Center for Visual Culture (Edmonton), Medea Electronique (Athens, Greece), and Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, Florida).