Collective Body is an interactive, virtual reality experience that invites us to meet ourselves and each other through movement. Set in the middle of a New Mexican storm, participants are guided to rediscover their first ways of engaging with the world, symbolizing formative life events that culminate in a shared exploration of our embodied selves. These key moments—beginning alone, discovering the unfamiliar, first encounters, and joyfully moving together—represent how our personal and collective stories are written through movement. Designed for 4 participants or more, Collective Body asks: how does a body hold histories over time and how are those histories felt and shared?
Collective Body is an interactive, virtual reality experience that invites us to meet ourselves and each other through movement. Set in the middle of a New Mexican storm, participants are guided to rediscover their first ways of engaging with the world, symbolizing formative life events that culminate in a shared exploration of our embodied selves. These key moments—beginning alone, discovering the unfamiliar, first encounters, and joyfully moving together—represent how our personal and collective stories are written through movement. Designed for 4 participants or more, Collective Body asks: how does a body hold histories over time and how are those histories felt and shared?
The experience uses virtual reality to open us to different sensations of our physical world while creating a new perception of ourselves as individuals within a collective. We are first guided to reappropriate movement and dancing in our own body, to rediscover our first ways of engaging with the world, before we meet the silent part ourselves that we express through movement.
This otherwise ephemeral self is generated using an algorithmic system that analyses our movement throughout the first two scenes. This self takes the form of an avatar, assigned out of 16 possible avatars, and is represented as a natural element accompanied by a musical theme.
Once we meet this version of ourselves, we are invited to meet another person, encountering them as their movement avatar while being encouraged to share our movement and music together. With our partner, we join the rest of the participants, encountering different ways that others exist through movement, mixing together to create a final moment of joyful, collective discovery in dance. The final moments together invite us to experiment with other embodied ways of being: we have the opportunity to try on different movement avatars, to feel another’s movement identity.
Collective Body asks what it means to experience ourselves in relation to others – without words and beneath the surface. How does a body hold histories over time? How do those histories get expressed and interpreted? How do many bodies create their own ecology?
Sarah Silverblatt-Buser (born in 1992, New Mexico, US) is a director, dancer, choreographer and educator. Based in Paris since 2018, she performs internationally with acclaimed cirque artist Yoann Bourgeois, the Company 47-49, and has danced in numerous projects including at the Grammy Awards with Harry Styles. She has choreographed works ranging from Street Art, a performance relating neoclassical music with parkour, to La Petite Danseuse in AR for the Musée d’Orsay and Danse, Danse, Danse- Matisse in VR for the Paris Museum of Modern Art. Alongside Gordon, she co-stage directed Rave-L Party, a chamber orchestra performance and rave party for the Théâtre du Châtelet, commissioned by l’Ensemble les Apaches. Recently, her directorial debut in VR, Collective Body, was selected to the 82nd Mostra de Venice Immersive Competition. Her teaching experience includes a guest professor appointment at Barnard College of Columbia University, teaching Digital Performance and Dance Improvisation.
Creator / Director
Sarah Silverblatt-Buser
Music composer
Harvey Causon
Producer
Oriane Hurard
Aurélie Leduc
Arnaud Colinart
Technical director & developer
Ferdinand Dervieux
Lead Artist
Arthur Maugendre
Sound Designer
Côme Jalibert
Narrated By
Sarah Silverblatt-Buser (EN)
Joséphine Berry (FR)
Made by
Albyon Studio
Co-distributed by
Diversion
Produced By
Atlas V, Body of Ways, Onassis ONX
Commissioned by
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
With the support of
CNC, Ville de Paris, Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Institut français, Centre des Arts d’Enghien-les-bains