Emily Craver’s MFA Thesis project past future tenses lives in a multiverse of iterations. Embracing theatricality and improvisational presence, the work craves interaction amongst performer, witness, technology, and the digital and physical space encapsulating them. The work employs rigorous physicality and dramatic embodiment of artificial intelligence to question the relationships between human and machine.

This piece was made possible in part by a Global Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Grant. Many thanks to Craver's committee Daniel Roberts, Norah Zuniga-Shaw, and Alex Oliszewski. Thanks to documenters: Kathryn Nusa Logan and Abby Koskinas. Many thanks to Amy Schmidt, Jonathon Hunter and Oded Huberman for production support . Many thanks to OSU Cohort 2021 for being an ever-present support system.Many thanks to Chair, Dr. Nadine George-Graves for providing encouragement and space for making during this year.

Born from dreams of outdoor performance over the summer, An Evening with Var and Farb was a duet in the Chadwick Arboretum with my partner, Doug Barber, and I. The necessity of outdoor performance comes with the necessity of a battery-operated set-up. This included: solar powered lights, battery operated amp, battery-operated keyboard, battery-operated camera, battery pack with AV power in which a small projector and television were plugged, a computer running Isadora program, and two microphones with stands.
Var and Farb exist in a simulated landscape, bringing together outdated technologies with the forward motion of Artificial Intelligences such as GPT-3. The piece jostles between verbatim chatbot text and improvised emergent text. How can building scores with glimmers of improvisation and rigorous set material give a functional flow of practiced and in-the-moment performance styles? Just as a chatbot or voice-assisted technology veers between set script and machine-learned devised replies, Doug and I created a score that bounced between set material and improvised inserts. It is in this space that I am most excited and inspired. How to rehearse an improvisational presence that gives space for reacting in the moment and sinks into a deeply practiced knowledge of the material.

Alternating Reality began in January of 2020 with night rehearsals in Studio 390 and 370 at OSU. The five collaborators, Sarah Bodony, Simone Burnett, Thaliyah Cools-Lartigue, Abby Koskinas, Sophia Smith and I created movement from improvisation, from ideas of technological buzzwords living in the body, from reckoning with the compression of emotion and relationships into a phone, a computer, a screen. We played with the game telephone, passing on whispers, and dancing close and with vigor. March of 2020 brought about a halt, a shift, a pivot. Fall 2020 semester saw us outside in the dance department tent, re-translating, re-configuring. A Zoom rehearsal compressed the movement into living rooms and kitchens. After months, the material took on new shape. How was the past (the dream of a close, intimate, audience-interactive piece) still lingering in the air around the movement? How are the phrases that used to be translated from an Isadora screen and now printed on papers, instead of whispered, changed? A full year after starting the piece, the dance artists have deeper relationships with each other, deeper understanding of the material, and a feeling of what could have been. The remnants of the previous versions lingered in the space while the urgency of the five dancers depending on each other’s knowledge rang clear.

alternating reality / screenshot from Kathryn Logan Footage

Begun as an online rehearsal process with Emily Pacilio and Shannon Nash, NYC-based collaborators, I was searching for what the piece looked like online. My work deals with digital interaction, but always in a live, theatrical setting. Now that COVID had shifted things online, I wondered, what is the work if it remains in the digital sphere? Geographically distanced, Emily, Shannon and I started meeting online once a week since August. Our music included Anna Meredith, Cate LeBon, Ana Roxanne, and the work made by our collaborators Doug Barber, Chrystine Rayburn, and Pat Glennon. We brought our full selves; we brought the music that was inspiring us. I held the space and allowed all the messiness of our lives to seep into the space. My time with the quintet had given me clarity on navigating the importance of being present with the work and humans available that day in that space. With Emily and Shannon, I started thinking even more drastic. What if the piece begins and ends in that one meeting? My energy and motivation towards something can often bubble into so many directions. This online version of past future tenses gives me a way to celebrate the beginning mode as the entire process.

immediacy

up next: