Creating at the technological forefront: Artist Chat with Carolyn Paine
- Kathryn Boland
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
“It’s getting to work on these kinds of innovative ideas and concepts – to bring dance back from this digital space on screens to the stage and beyond – that I think is really invigorating.”
Carolyn Paine is no stranger to pushing the creative envelope; through her Hartford, CT-based dance company CONNECtic Dance, as well as other projects, she’s always dared to innovate. An actress, comedienne, and director as well as dance artist, she’s also no stranger to working in a multi-hyphenate space: bridging disciplines, skills, and perspectives.
Paine, along with many dedicated and experienced collaborators, have taken that pathbreaking spirit to the intersection of dance and the latest technology: projection-mapping, 3-D immersion, and the like. Through a number of different projects, that work has been in service of exploring frontiers as vast as space and experiences as meaningful as LGBTQIA+ love stories.
I spoke with Paine about the process of creating and presenting these works, where the challenges as well as the unique benefits lie in that process, how she sees this groundbreaking technology as key in the future of dance, and more. She can describe it best, so I humbly and gratefully hand the microphone over to her – take it away, Carolyn!
This work undoubtedly uses technology at the contemporary forefront: immersive installation and projection mapping, for example. What do you think that technology uniquely contributes to the choreographic work?
As a choreographer, when you are approaching a work that will be presented on this scale, such as being projected on a building, you have to think differently. Movement translates in another way when it is seen larger. Shapes and lines of the body are even more important.
I have found that simplicity has the most impact. Viewers experience dance so differently when it is large scale and immersive. They are up close in ways even filmed dance for screens doesn’t allow. So the focus is what feels most vivid and visually engaging.
For example, I think of Lumaria. Frequent collaborator Ryan Glista and another artist Mercury created the installation, an immersive audio-visual experience featuring vivid projections from floor to ceiling across towering ribbons of fabric. The dance I created for this is not so much about choreographed sequences, but movement that can be multiplied and create an echo.
One of the most beautiful parts is just a ballerina (who happens to be me for that shot) spinning in tight bourree turns. It is something I would absolutely never choreograph for a staged performance, but is essential for an experience where people feel like they are standing inside this colorful void where dance is happening around them – like stars in a sky.
Conversely, our Telly Award-winning Stories of Queer Love is an installation piece that has been projected on a large scale on prominent city buildings and in places like The Museum of Science in Boston. It’s about telling a story, through choreography and relationship, in a more traditional sense. But one still has to rethink how things work.
The choreography can’t take up space or travel, because you don’t have a full stage and the frame you have to stay in is much tighter. This forced intimacy worked particularly well for choreography expressing love and anguished or passionate relationships.
Yet it is still a choreographic challenge; the end product will be edited and viewed from 50 feet in the air. Working within such confines, and having to think differently, has certainly changed how I approach working as a choreographer. It’s challenged me in new and exciting ways.
You've also said that you think this direction is the future of dance. How and why?
In my working lifetime as a dancer artist, how and where dance is viewed: I’ve seen that evolve immensely. Historically, dance has been seen on a proscenium stage or in something like a large budget movie musical. It has had full casts, costumes, and storytelling. Then you have smaller companies doing more intimate, exploratory pieces and site-specific works.
But those were things that only real dance lovers would seek out and see. Then shows like So You Think You Can Dance came to TV, and all of a sudden dance was in a mainstream spotlight – where so many more people were exposed to it and getting to know dance artists.
Yet what’s really changed dance has been social media. It’s given a platform for all dancers and choreographers to share their works. All of a sudden everyone is learning the newest TikTok dance and dancing on their social media. Dance has never had more of a platform – fascinating!
So what I find exciting about getting to work in this merger of dance and technology is that I see it as the next step. Everyone can, and is, filming and editing their own dance for phone screens. Dance and technology have met, and I’m just trying to get a grasp on the bigger picture of where that can go – and taking it far beyond just social media technology.
For my Nutcracker Suite & Spicy this year, for example, Ryan Glista and I paired projections with existing choreography to transport the audience into the show’s magical, whimsical world. Throughout the show, characters interact with many projected worlds, execute seemingly impossible choreography, and even break the fourth wall to move beyond the stage.
Much of this is included in the “Shadow Dream” sequence, in which the character “Dross” navigates through a twisted alternate reality of flying dancers and growing nutcrackers towering over him. But I think one of the most successful examples of this in the show is the “Snowball Scene.” Dancers were already tumbling acrobatically and gliding across giant pearly white balls.
But Ryan brought in his friend and colleague, video game designer and interactive developer Patrick Belanger, to further animate the scene. He has a uniquely-developed process that uses real-time response to the dancers' movements, using Unity game engine.
So, for instance, every time the dancers bounce, the projected snow puffs up seemingly from underneath them. Throughout the whole snowball dance, we had an elaborate sweeping snow particle field also projected all around the audience to make it truly immersive.
It’s getting to work on these kinds of innovative ideas and concepts – to bring dance back from this digital space on screens to the stage and beyond – that I think is really invigorating.
The work also explores meaningful social issues and futuristic themes (such as space exploration). How do the aesthetics, the artistic approaches, support the building of these themes?
I think that the starting point is different than when I’m creating a traditional work of choreography, versus collaborating on a project for a digital presentation. Many of the concepts you’re working with are things that a team of designers, animators, and editors know they can handle. You all have to be on the same page in order to create a successful work.
For a couple of years, I have been working on a 360° dome dance film set in space. It’s been a really hard process because we are trying to marry aesthetic, some scientific accuracy, and visual thrills that will play well to a viewer in a planetarium – and find a way to successfully create choreography that tells the story and looks good on a 360° camera.
We’ve tested so many different ways of filming and different types of tricks to create “flight” for dancers: from aerial work to green screen filming. It’s a totally different experience because your job as a choreographer is not to just create movement.
You have to think about the aesthetic and how what you are creating can fit into this final magic. You are building things with a team instead of just working in a vacuum. That can be frustrating as a choreographer because you have movement ideas that you want to execute – but from a technology production standpoint, they just won’t work. Everything is a learning process.
With a lot going on (from projections to aerial work to dancers partnering in the foreground), the aesthetic manages to stay clean and cohesive. How, to your mind, can choreographers construct that sort of balance and integration?
With these projects, I know that the movement is as much of the focus for the experience as the digital art. Neither one can be the sole focus; they have to work together. And you as the choreographer and the digital artist team have to communicate. That’s when magic can happen.
I have found that keeping things clean and cohesive is key. When you are watching dance projected huge on a building, with animation swirling around it and bright colors, the movement can’t be about fast, sharp, and intricate hits. There has to be this broadness and bigness that allows the viewers to take it in and understand what they are seeing.
For example, last year I worked on Magic Mural. It was an innovative public art project brought to life by RiseUP for Arts: bringing together cutting-edge projection mapping technology, art from around the world, and a 40,000 square-foot building facade. I choreographed transitions with dancers as little painters who fly in and magically crawl about – creating patterns as they “paint.”
A big part of this was just figuring out shapes and simple movements that we could film with the dancers, so that we could then work together with an editor and an animator to make it look like the performers were painting in the final video.
These are challenging choreographic parameters. You have to be willing to see the editing and animation process as part of your work with movement creation. In this case, animator and editor Jacob Rodier worked with [Glista] and I to achieve the final vision.
You've presented these works in various settings and contexts. Considering all of the production complexity at hand, what are the biggest challenges with translating the works to a new venue? On the flip side of that, what benefits are there to these works having greater exposure?
When it comes to translating work from one context and setting to another, I can describe a couple of successful examples. My Nutcracker Suite & Spicy went from being a traditional stage production, to being translated and filmed for a large digital screen installation on the front of a theatre building, to being projection-mapped integrating with architecture on walls.
And all of this allowed the show to achieve a good deal. It’s a show set in this fanciful world of imaginative, modern interpretations of the classical ballet’s characters and scenes. Having these different installations and contexts allowed me to realize my vision for this show. I’m so grateful to The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts and [Glista] for that. I’m really excited to see where this show goes next, now that it has all of these iterations and is even more unique.
Another example is the Stories of Queer Love project [Glista] and I collaboratively created. With this work, I choreographed along with four other choreographers representing diverse styles of dance, to create a singular work within immersive audio-visual experiences. It was originally created for the public art installation screens on the building at The Bushnell, and designed so that each choreographer’s piece was presented simultaneously across multiple channels.
Our works individually explored different love stories from across the LGBTQ+ community: from tentative exploration, to passionate polyamory, to agonizing conflict. The audiences were invited to openly explore the space, either viewing each story individually, or stepping back to feel the shared energy in the various interpretations of the music.
When we saw the final product, we were inspired to move it beyond the walls of The Bushnell. We’ve since presented these works in a theatre with projections, projection-mapped on city buildings, traveling video installation in galleries, featured in the dance section of an immersive exhibit, and in a special 180° video screen exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Science.
The challenge here was to keep the choreographers’ stories and intent intact while also reformatting the visual experience. I worked with [Glista], and we were thrilled to see how well this work has adapted to each presentation.
That is exciting, because it really allows the work to be seen and experienced by so many people in myriad ways. It has inspired us to think this way for all future projects. We’re keeping an open mind for how and where they can be seen.
Please share anything else you'd like to. Thanks so much for your time and insights!
I’m just excited to try to find more ways to present dance like it has never been seen before. To bring dance into the immersive space. I see it as a way to reach a broader audience. Dancemakers know it is hard to sell tickets to a show filled with dance.
There are many people who won’t willingly buy a ticket to a dance show. But so many people are dance lovers and just don’t know it. I love watching how excited people are to see magical-looking movements projected larger-than-life above their head.
When you get to work as a choreographer in this world with technology and immersive arts, you get to re-imagine how dance can be created and viewed. It feels like the early days of animation where Walt Disney entranced everyone. We have the opportunity to bring such magic to dance. And what is most important to me is to honor the training and human-ness of dance.
It’s easy with technology, with animation and AI, to just create dance. But I always use real dancers. The magic comes from how it is edited and the environment, but what the dancers’ bodies are doing is always their own. They held that position. They made that shape. They were on a wire and did that flip. And the emotion and live performance feel is still there.
I think it’s crucial we don’t allow technology to beat that out. I think one of the reasons [Glista] and I so successfully make magic together is we share that important goal – and make it the first rule of how we work. Dance can become digital, but the dancers and soul of it cannot.
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