At the intersection of music, dance, and computational design, "Proxies" is a meditation on attention and care. The production premiered in the Doris Duke Theatre at the 2026 Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. The work considers what aspects of embodied experience can and cannot be captured through wearable technology, drawing from research on loneliness, empathy, and ethics of care. Read the digital essay here.

 

Throughout the performance, dancers wear custom-fabricated gloves and insoles with embedded sensors. Rather than recording precise biomechanics, these devices invite an iterative, cyclical negotiation of imprecise interpretation — from movement to data, from data to music, and from music back to movement. The sonic environment draws from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Working collaboratively with multi-instrumentalist duo Mel Hsu and Eric Seligman, we selected motifs from the symphony to recompose into variations, creating a compositional structure capacious enough to absorb and frame the unpredictability of live sensor data. The symphony's formal logic of subtle recurrence and transformation grounds the inquiry into care – attending, over time, to the same space only to find it newly illuminated. 

The title “Proxies” simultaneously gestures to two investigations: first, an inquiry into and critique of the assumption that data can be a “stand-in” and an approximation of reality, and second, an attempt to amplify the nuances of lived experience that are lost in datafied representations. Steven Geofrey and I explored how this approach serves as a way to illuminate the embodied relationships that data are meant to represent but fail to do so in high fidelity. 

 

Pressure serves as a proxy for care, touch as a proxy for attention — each a trace of what is present, and a mark of what is not. As a whole, the creative project is intended as its own provocation to consider not only the limits of what can be captured through technology, but also how the fidelity of what is captured may be compromised when moving across kinesthetic, computational, and musical representations. 
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The project is supported by the Knight Foundation, Jacob's Pillow, Boston Foundation "Live Arts Boston" Grant, Northeastern University Center for the Arts, the ArtLab at Harvard University, and the Movement Arts Creation Studio. View the ongoing case study, designed with Steven Geofrey. 

 

Creative Team:

Artistic Director: Ilya Vidrin

Dramaturgy + Computational Design: Steven Geofrey

Creative Technologist: Peter Martel

Engineering + Fabrication: Eugene Zeleny

Wearable Glove Design: Rosa Weinberg

Musicians: Eric Seligman and Mel Hsu

Movement Artists: Elizabeth Epsen, Hannah Franz, Olivia Moon, Kelvin Vu, and Cassie Wang.

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Special Thanks to Margot Aknin, Dara Capley, Raxel Kempenaar, Leah Misano, Melissa Sherman-Bennett, Valeria Solomonoff for movement research in earlier iterations.

Cinematography by Sue Murad

Process film created by Jessi Stegall

Production Assistant: Krista Brochu