Performance + Technology: Embodied Research, Creative Practice, and Shared World-Making
Courtesy of Andre M. Zachery, Renegade Performance Group. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Courtesy of Andre M. Zachery, Renegade Performance Group. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Background
Digital technologies increasingly shape how people move, communicate, create, gather, and understand the world. At the same time, bodies, communities, and cultural practices influence how technologies are designed, interpreted, and used. Performance provides a valuable framework for examining this reciprocal relationship because it centers movement, sensation, presence, participation, and lived experience.
Performance + Technology is a collaborative research initiative and public program celebrating the publication of The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology. The project brings artists, scholars, students, and collaborators together across ACCAD, the Department of Dance, and the Wexner Center for the Arts to investigate the relationships between performance, technology, bodies, and society.
Rather than treating technology solely as a collection of tools, the project considers technology as something created through social, material, cultural, and embodied practices. Performance becomes both a subject of study and a research method through which participants can test ideas, encounter new perspectives, and imagine alternative technological futures.
The program asks:
- What does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence?
- How do bodies and technologies shape one another?
- What becomes possible when technology is approached through movement, liveness, presence, relationality, and community?
- How can performance reveal assumptions embedded in technological systems?
- Where might artists be leading conversations about technology that other disciplines, institutions, and policymakers have not yet imagined?
- How can creative practice help build more livable and equitable technological futures?
Research
Performance + Technology uses performance, conversation, demonstration, and collaborative experimentation as interconnected forms of research. The program creates opportunities for participants to investigate technology through direct experience as well as lively public discourse, digital documentation, and interpretive artifacts. These activities explore how performance can function as a method for sensing, analyzing, and reshaping relationships among people, technologies, institutions, and environments.
Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology (2026) with 60+ Global Contributors
Available via Routledge and the OSU Library:
The central outcome of this research is the new text edited by Norah Zuniga Shaw and Maaike Bleeker, the Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology produced collaboratively over several years of collective effort including the support of ACCAD Graduate Students and Research staff. This volume began with our shared impulse to collaborate, an invitation from Routledge, and decades of independent and often shared activity in performance and technology, scholarly and artistic research and creation, teaching, and relationship-building in an international field ripe for a new record. Norah identifies principally as an interdisciplinary artist working in dance, Maaike as a scholar working in Theater and we work in a expanded arts and scholarly context that crosses and blurs those boundaries in all our work and especially this project.
Abstract:
Technology has become fully integrated into the ecologies in which we live, including our ways of making and making sense of theater, dance, and performance.
While these practices have long histories of incorporating tools and instruments in live performances, from masks, to amplification, lighting, and stagecraft, technology today can no longer be understood as a tool complementing essentially non‑technological behaviors or environments. Technologies and how they are developed and used are informed by ideas, assumptions, and practices that are culturally and historically situated and have material impacts. Whether implicitly or intentionally, we are always already operating in and requiring creative and critical means of engaging with technoscientific lifeworlds.
Authors in this volume show how human‑technology intersections within the performing arts reflect developments in the world at large and how artistic inquiry might contribute to or intervene in these tendencies. Together, the chapters in this volume offer a broad view that includes diverse types of performances and a range of technologies without imposing these as categories on a field that does not operate along the lines of such categorizations.
This broad view also allows us to bring together discourses and subjects that have been discussed separately in relation to different genres or aspects of performance, different types of technologies, or from the perspective of different technology‑related concerns, including interactivity, immersion, inter‑, multi‑, and transmediality, equity, futurisms, archival practices, and new dramaturgies.
Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Experience
A central focus of the project is the role of performance in conversations about artificial intelligence and technological change. Discussions about AI are often framed around efficiency, automation, and computational capability. Performance introduces different questions concerning bodies, labor, attention, identity, authorship, presence, care, and collective experience.
By centering embodied and creative knowledge, the project asks how artists can contribute to the design, interpretation, and governance of technological systems. It also considers how performance can make the effects of technology perceptible, contestable, and open to revision.
Meaningful Public Dialog and Increased Access
Because the book is priced for libraries and is expensive for individuals to purchase, the editors have created an event with the Wexner Center for the Arts that provides lived and recorded access to many of the core ideas in the text.
Happening live in November, 2026, this mini festival features a keynote conversation with the book’s editors, a lightening round of provocations and offerings from contributing artists and scholars, Thomas DeFrantz, Jessica Rajko, Harmony Bench, Shannon Cuykendall, and Marcela Fuentes, and a reception, raffle for free copies of the books and time to experience Okwui Okpowwasili’s performance and technology installation in the galleries at the Wexner together.
The evening invites audiences to think, sense, and experiment alongside contributing artists and scholars as we consider not only what technology does in performance but what performance can teach us about living well in a technoscientific world. Special guest speakers include Thomas DeFrantz, Jessica Rajko, Shannon Cuykendall, Kate Ladenheim, Bhumi Patel, Marcela Fuentes, and Harmony Bench.
Coedited by Ohio State’s Norah Zuniga Shaw and the University of Utrecht’s Maaike Bleeker, The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology begins from the premise that technologies and bodies are co-constitutive and that performance offers vital methods for sensing, understanding, and reshaping those relationships. For this special event international contributors and guests will take up pressing questions from the perspective of performance and embodied experience: What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? What becomes visible as technology is approached through practices of performance with attention to bodies, movement, liveness, presence, relationality, and shared world-making? And where might artists be leading conversations about technology that other fields, institutions, and policymakers have yet to imagine?
Embodied and Performance-Based Inquiry
Performance offers ways to investigate questions that may be difficult to address through written or quantitative research alone. Movement, sound, space, duration, attention, and interaction can expose how technological systems affect bodies and relationships. Participants examine technology as an embodied experience. This approach places particular emphasis on liveness, perception, participation, relationality, and the ways knowledge can be produced through action.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Student Leadership
The project brings together contributors working across performance studies, dance, media arts, design, sound, computation, and related creative disciplines. ACCAD provides a setting in which these fields can meet through shared experiments and conversations. Studio visits, class visits, and small-group sessions allow participating artists and scholars to exchange working methods, identify common research questions, and develop possibilities for future collaboration.
Students participate not only as an audience but also as emerging researchers, artists, and contributors to the exchange. In addition to curricular integration, the project is funding four Performance and Technology fellows to support the public event and digital digest creation:
Sidra Bell is an internationally recognized choreographer and educator, currently pursuing her PhD in Dance at The Ohio State University and serving as a Graduate Associate at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Liv Bryant is a Black queer improviser whose art unfolds in realms of dance, food, text, technology, and visual arts. 3rd year MFA Fellow at the Ohio State University
Shaela Davis is a transdisciplinary artist exploring community-based practice and embodied archive through dance and DJing. OSU Global Arts + Humanities Graduate Team Fellow.
Afaliah Tribune is a choreographer, performer, and dance educator whose practice is rooted in dances of the African diaspora. She brings dance, live music, and spoken word together to explore Black womanhood and how movement carries stories across generations. She is an MFA candidate in Dance at The Ohio State University.
Sound, Space, and Digital Documentation
The program includes MOLA Ambisonics and Digital Digest recordings. These activities connect the project’s conceptual questions with ACCAD research involving spatial sound, immersive environments, documentation, and digital storytelling.
Ambisonic sound practices provide a way to study how audio changes perception, orientation, and participation within a space. Digital Digest recordings extend the research beyond the live gathering by documenting ideas, methods, and conversations for future teaching, scholarship, and public engagement.
Program
November 9: ACCAD Open House and Collaboration Day
The November 9 program begins with an open house from 10 a.m. to noon at ACCAD, 331 Sullivant Hall. Visitors can encounter ACCAD research through studio visits, demonstrations, conversations, MOLA Ambisonics, Digital Digest recordings, and collaborative sessions. The collaboration day creates an informal environment in which visiting contributors, faculty, students, and community members can exchange ideas and learn about current creative research. Final room locations for the workshop and guest lecture remain to be confirmed.
November 10: Interactive Conversation, Book Launch, and Reception
On November 10 at 5 p.m., Maaike Bleeker and Norah Zuniga Shaw will lead the Performance + Technology: An Interactive Conversation, Book Launch, and Reception in the Wexner Center for the Arts Performance Space with special guests:
Thomas DeFrantz, Jessica Rajko, Shannon Cuykendall, Kate Ladenheim, Bhumi Patel, Marcela Fuentes, and Harmony Bench.
The public program celebrates the publication of The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology through an interactive conversation with the book’s editors and creative offerings by contributing artists and scholars. The event invites the public to think, sense, and experiment alongside the contributors.
November 12: Digital Digest Collaboration / Research Salon
Norah Zuniga Shaw is working with Maaike Bleeker to establish a digital platform that increases access to the knowledge and research activities from the book and make it available through ACCAD. The digital digest will be published in 2027 on ACCAD’s website.
November 13: Performance Robotics Lecture and Discussion
On November 13 from 12:45 to 2:15 p.m., Maaike Bleeker will present a Visiting Artist Lecture in 350 Sullivant Hall.
The lecture extends the project’s investigation of performance and technology and offers students, artists, and researchers an additional opportunity to engage with the intellectual context surrounding the publication with a focus on Maaike Bleeker’s work with performance and robotics.
Research Significance
Performance + Technology demonstrates how creative practice can produce knowledge about technological systems and their effects. It expands technology research beyond questions of functionality by asking how technologies are experienced through bodies, spaces, relationships, and communities.
The project contributes to several areas of inquiry:
Performance and technology studies, Artificial intelligence and society, Embodied interaction, Somatics and phenomenology, Dance and movement research, Spatial and immersive media, Intermedia performance, Sound and auditory experience, Human-computer interaction, Creative research methods, Interdisciplinary collaboration, Public humanities, Ethics and technological futures, By connecting scholarly publication, artistic practice, teaching, experimentation, and public programming, the initiative supports research that can circulate through multiple forms.
Funding and Support
Performance + Technology is presented through collaboration among the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, the Department of Dance, and the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts, the Arts and Humanities AI Institute, and the AI Fluency initiative of Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Investigators and Project Team
Project Leadership and Editors
Maaike Bleeker
In my work I look at performances of humans and non-humans, in the theatre and in other contexts. I am interested in how bringing together Theatre and Performance Studies with other fields of knowledge illuminates what happens in making and watching performances of various kinds, how humans interact with other humans as well as with non-human agents like robots or instruments, and how experiences and ways of understanding come about in such interactions in the theatre, in daily life, and in scientific research. Transmission in Motion is also the name of the interdisciplinary research group that I initiated at Utrecht University and that provides a platform for collaborations and events. Information about our research projects and activities can be found at https://transmissioninmotion.sites.uu.nl/. My research is grounded in Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies, Art History & Theory, and Philosophy. From this already interdisciplinary basis, it expanded via Cultural Analysis towards Media Theory, Philosophy of Technology, Cognitive Science, and more recently, Robotics and Design theory. I recognize myself in Jonathan Culler’s observation that theory today “has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong.” This theory is interdisciplinary, analytical and speculative, and also critical in that it shows how that which may seem to be natural is actually the product of culture and history. I believe that theory in this sense is among the most important offerings of the humanities today. Furthermore, theory thus understood is not opposed to practice nor does it exist separately from practice. Instead, theory itself is a practice, thus and allowing for an understanding of other practices as partners in dialogue.
Prior to my appointment at Utrecht University, I taught at the Piet Zwart postgraduate program in Fine Arts (Rotterdam), the School for New Dance Development (Amsterdam) and the University of Amsterdam. I worked as a dramaturge in theatre and dance for more than fifteen years. Together with directors Jeroen van den Berg and Ivar van Urk, I founded theatre company Het Oranjehotel (1993-2000). I performed in several lecture performances and translated five plays that were performed by major Dutch theatre companies. I was an artist in residence at the Amsterdam School for the Arts, member of the jury of the Dutch National Theatre Festival TF (2007-2008), and I served as president of Performance Studies international (2011-2016).
Norah Zuniga Shaw
I am an artist, writer and director for performance and technology projects at the intersection of the body and ecology, collaboration and liberation. My screen-based, interactive, and performance works have been presented throughout the US, Asia, Australia, and Europe, and my essays, poems and interviews appear in numerous books and journals. I regularly receive fellowships, grants, and awards and am invited to present public lectures and workshops. Improvisation is the foundation of my work. Materials include sound and movement, text and image, system, interface, interaction, design, animation, and community. Since 2004, I serve as director for dance and technology, professor and mentor for interdisciplinary practice at Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and Department of Dance where I co-founded the Motion Lab to foster innovations in 21st century education, inclusive pedagogy, creative research, and performance technology. I mentor artists in interdisciplinary research and generative archives. I develop, manage, and consult on theater and lab development, multimedia research and curriculum, and facility design for innovation in technology and embodied practices. Our clients include Barnard College, University of Alabama, Scripps College, the University of Southern California, and the ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado where I also serve on the board. I have partnered with the Doris Duke Foundation on XR and Performance Pre-visualization initiatives as part of their Performance and Technology funding and initiatives. NZShaw.art
Contributing Artists and Scholars
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
Books: Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004).
Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in writing.
Teaching: Northwestern, University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. Has chaired Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. Visit: www.slippage.org
Harmony Bench
I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose research cuts across technology, media, and society. I am Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University, where I research practices, performances, and circulations of dance in digital, screen, and computational contexts.
I wrote Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (University of Minnesota Press), which grapples with the consequences of online dance transmission from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. I use the idea of the common as a through-line to understand how dancers negotiate movement as an expression of belonging that also circulates outside of communities of practice in an era of information globalization and participatory media.
With my longtime collaborator Kate Elswit, I bring digital humanities and dance history into greater dialogue through computational analysis and data visualization. Our projects include Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry,Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data and Radical Accounting: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Data as a Framework for Historical Imagination (commissioned for Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum).
Coming soon is Archival Entanglements (The Ohio State University Press, 2026), which I co-edited with Puja Batra-Wells. Showcasing approaches from traditional essays to artistic engagements, the collection complicates questions of archival memory; raises issues of accessibility, erasure, latency, and surveillance.
Shannon Cuykendall
Shannon Cuykendall is a transdisciplinary artist and scholar working across the fields of dance, interaction design, and cognitive science. She lives in Vancouver, Canada on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Using a technoscience lens, she critically examines the transmission of kinesthetic and choreographic knowledge in technologically-mediated spaces.
Her work in experimental film, interactive installation and multimedia documentary invites audiences to kinesthetically experience movement alongside the performer. Shannon prioritizes mobile technologies to seamlessly integrate the body with technology. Her choreography, interactive installations, and dance films have been exhibited and performed in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the USA.
Shannon received the SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award and is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University (SIAT). She works in the iViz research lab where she critically examines how generative AI models interpret the human body and movement through a contemporary dance lens. Shannon received her PhD from SIAT and became a Certified Movement Analyst through the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She frequently teaches undergraduate classes in film, interactive arts, critical media theory, and dance at SFU. Visit: www.shannoncuykendall.wordpress.com/about/
Marcela A. Fuentes
Marcela A. Fuentes is a performance theorist and practitioner whose work tracks how notions that are central to studies of performance such as embodiment, liveness, eventness, and site-specificity are redefined in the era of digitally mediated communication. Her book, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (University of Michigan Press) maps out the entanglement of street protests and digitally mediated mobilizations in response to state violence and neoliberal exploitation. Fuentes was awarded fellowships and grants such as the Fulbright Fellowship and the Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral research grant.
Her work was published in Text and Performance Quarterly, e-misférica, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Conjunto, LatFem, Moléculas Malucas, Página 12, and edited volumes on transnational and activist performance. Her interests include feminist theory and performance, theories of embodiment, affect theory, queer of color critique, hemispheric performance, practice-based research, and the digital humanities. She was a member of the Argentine feminist collective Ni Una Menos and served as External Consultant for the Buenos Aires Performance Biennial and Council Member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Her lecture performance Sujeto Transnacional was presented in Argentina, Brazil, and the US. Her performance #Mar. A Nomadic Lecture opened the academic track of the Performance Biennial in Buenos Aires.
Bhumi Patel
Writer Bhumi B Patel directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, and science fiction choreographer. She creates performances as a love letter to her ancestors. She seeks to create movement at the intersection of embodied research and generating new futures, using improvisational practice as a pursuit for liberation. Patel earned her PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University, and her MFA in Dance from Mills College.
Bhumi is a member of Dancing Around Race, founded by Gerald Casel, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and publications. Patel’s work has been presented at Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Choreofest, Movement Research, The Asia Pacific Dance Festival, Urban Arts Space, Human Resources, CounterPulse, Joe Goode Annex, RoundAntennae, SAFEhouse Arts, max10, RAWdance's Concept Series, The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest, Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival, and Studio 210 Residency. Bhumi has been a Lead Artist with SAFEhouse Arts, an Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow, and a Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow.
Her research has been presented at the Dance Studies Association, Performance Studies International, the Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, the National Women's Studies Association, the Popular Culture Association, and the International Conference on Movement and Computing. Patel been published in Performance Research Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Contact Quarterly, and InDance. She serves as Editorial Assistant for Choreographic Practices. Bhumi was a Dance/USA Fellow and a YBCA 100 Honoree. Visit: www.pateldanceworks.org
Jessica Rajko
Jessica Rajko is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and scholar working at the intersection of dance and technology. Her work investigates how complex digital systems shape—and are shaped by—dance and choreographic practice.
She designs haptic/sonic media that expands the sensory dimensions of performance, enabling audiences to experience movement, data, and physical presence. Her work, Politics of the Grid, was funded by the Knight Foundation and integrates her dance-theatre practice with her custom haptic/sonic media system. She created media for Brother(hood) Dance!, BAIRA MVMNT PHLOSPHY, and Dirty Glove Bvck, with presentations at venues such as the Wexner Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, OT301, Currents New Media Festival, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Detroit Music Hall, Phoenix Art Museum, and Mesa Arts Center.
Her research examines the entanglements of artistic labor in computing and engineering research. She is co-lead of Decoding Digital Bodies, that interrogates how dance shapes the code, metadata, and digital archives of Boston Dynamic’s Spot robots and Choreography SDK.
Jessica has presented her work at the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces, Harvard’s Digital Futures Consortium, University of Toronto’s BMO Lab, UPenn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and more. Her scholarship appears in the Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Dance Research Journal, Politics of the Machine, and ACM’s International Conference on Movement and Computing. She is currently Associate Dean - College of Fine, Performing & Communication Arts, Wayne State University. Visit: www.jessicarajko.com
Kate Ladenheim
Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer and media artist. Their practice investigates the interplay between social and technological systems, focusing on how bodies navigate, subvert, and are ultimately shaped by them.
Ladenheim is an Assistant Professor of Choreography at UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and a recipient of the Google Artists + Machine Intelligence Faculty Research Award. They were Artist in Residence in creative practice at the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance at the University of Maryland. Ladenheim holds an M.F.A. in Media Design Practices from ArtCenter College of Design, where they were also a postgraduate fellow. She conducted research in motion interfaces for robotics design at U.C.L.A., and was an Artist in Residence at the Robotics, Automation, & Dance Lab at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Ladenheim's projects have been presented at EMPAC, The Brown Arts Institute, Jacob's Pillow, National Sawdust, Media Art Xploration, DancePlace, The Performance Arcade, and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They were a member of the MAXmachina Lab cohort, as well as an Artist in Residence at the Barnard Movement Lab. Their work has been celebrated in Dance Magazine as one of “25 to Watch” and “Best of 2018.” They are supported by a Creative Capital Award and an LL Stewart Fellowship at PRAx. Visit: www.kateladenheim.com
Collaborating Units
- Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design
- Department of Dance
- Wexner Center for the Arts
- Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts
- Arts and Humanities AI Institute