PME-ART has given carte blanche to the artists Kamissa Ma Koïta and Elena Stoodley, and the project Survival Technologies is the result of this remarkable collaboration. The work is a vibrant gathering that considers how different ways of coming together might in and of themselves become technologies for survival. In six interconnected, escalating movements, the performers’ physical and rhythmic interactions spar with The Machine, a real-time computer algorithm that conjures up all the familiar and unfamiliar ways we love, hate, make use of and fight against the machine logics that surround us.
Taking place in the round – with the audience both witnessing and immersed in the action – and bringing together essential questions and backgrounds from visual art, dance, theatre, music, Afrocentric traditions and lived experience, Survival Technologies employs an unexpected, everchanging balance between structure and improvisation. Waves of dancing and drumming build upon each previous movement as, whether we realize it or not, a story is being told, inviting the spectator to fully consider whether they are part of the dance or on the side of the machine.