The beauty of human movement and the elegance of technology come together in a new kind of performance debuting at Canberra Theatre Centre on 14-15 July. Lucie In the Sky, from Australasian Dance Collective (ADC), explores what it is to be human through both bodies and drones.

Premiering as part of the new Uncharted Territory festival that takes over the capital from 7 to 16 July, the first-of-its-kind production comes from the mind of ADC Artistic Director, Amy Hollingsworth, wondering what could happen if drones were emotionally coded. Assigning human emotions or characteristics to an inanimate object is known as anthropomorphising or “the Pixar effect”.

“What we’ve seen through Pixar and Disney and how they’ve been able to really skilfully develop these ways of making us as the viewer feel something … we’ve humanised them to an effect that we see ourselves or we see something we recognise in them and have an emotional response,” says Harrison Elliott, company artist with ADC.

Playing five different characters are nearly 50 drones, capturing the essence of those familiar tropes we all know – Lucie is the friend, M is a leader, Skip a jester, red a rebel, and Rue a sage – each emulating human emotions and distinguished by different colours. Mr Elliott says the production doesn’t necessarily follow a single narrative, rather, it dives into our understanding of relationships through different scenes.

“There are these call lines of interactions and relationships that we see throughout the show, which demonstrate various relationships that we can have with drones or with technology – whether that is oppressive or controlling, or whether that is a guiding light, or whether that is something playful and companion like,” he says.

Incorporating the drone’s short life span into the production was a second-by-second process, says Mr Elliott. Never having worked with drones, he says it has been quite the experience, especially getting used to hearing them while being on stage, one dancer likening it to being surrounded by a swarm of bees.

“I really enjoyed the process, mostly because of this process of endowment and working on it with the drone in mind but not present in the space, then to have the drone in the space is an incredibly rewarding experience. You’ve set up your side of the relationship projecting onto something that isn’t there and once the drone comes into the space, there’s this magical moment where you go ‘I’ve built this connection with this drone’,” he says.

“Their pathways are really set, my material is set but there is great expanse on stage with them where their things can shift and play can happen.”

Humans projecting emotions onto inanimate objects isn’t a new thing; Mr Elliott says a desire for connection is in our nature. We naturally look for meaning in things, in our space and in our relationships to make connections and to tell a story.

“We look at puppies on the internet and kittens on the internet and we look at their eyes and we say ‘Ah, they’re so human’; we immediately kind of begin to attribute our own qualities onto these other entities. I think through that we are searching for those relationships and to make sense of them.”

However, according to Mr Elliott, there is a close line in this process; when something gets too close to human it seems to be a line too far and it is no longer cute or appealing.

“There’s something really interesting about when we accept something and when we go through this process of recognition and go ‘I like this, I resonate with this, or I’m sympathetic towards this, this is something I want to keep’. The other side is when it becomes a little bit too uncanny, it ventures too close to the human.”

Hoping to capture that sweet spot, Lucie In the Sky has been a labour of love for all involved at ADC. While a work of art, the production also has a strong scientific and educational background. ADC has worked closely with the ANU’s School of Cybernetics program and World of Drones Education to try and capture a sense of how drones and humans could work collaboratively in the future.

“I hope it inspires a bit of thought about relationships to technology and also relationships to humans and how every one of us individually fits into that little cocktail of relationships that we have in really different ways with technology,” Mr Elliott says.

See the world collide in Lucie In the Sky at Canberra Theatre Centre, 14-15 July; canberratheatrecentre.com.au

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