Learning from the Future

In Learning from the Future, Colette Sadler, the winner of the second edition of the PODIUM competition, imagines replacing the human body with an inanimate one and reflects on the virtual nature of how it is presented in a post-human world. The prototype BODY A inhabits a science fiction world. This highly sophisticated bio-machine’s gestures are super fast. BODY A has no consciousness and is unable to distinguish between intentions and external impulses. However, it looks like an attractive human. The body of performer and dancer Leah Marojevic is viewed as a mere receptacle that can be filled or emptied with a flow of coded data that seems to set her in motion, ordering her to perform a fragmented dance and move through a dizzying series of complex algorithms. BODY A is a perfectly controlled device that was designed to perform. It exists without any gender and serves without any ideology. The British choreographer expertly injects a conflict between the virtual and the real, between robotic artificiality and the resurgence of the primitive body, transporting the viewer from their seat to a world of emotion and poetry.