Artist-choreographer Kate Ladenheim falls repeatedly to various pop songs and you, the audience member, rate her level of commitment to falling.
In COMMIT!, dancer-choreographer Kate Ladenheim repeatedly falls until she can fall no more, her movements monitored by motion capture and sensors discerning velocity and impact force. This performance of dare and endurance takes audience participation to the next level—audiences rate Ladenheim’s commitment, and Ladenheim takes their feedback into account as she attempts to improve her falling, making herself into a playable avatar. All the while data visualizations measure just how hard the artist actually falls. As technological surveillance and gamified interaction systems come to life, they reveal the social patterns of the judge-audience’s expectations—and the illusion of embodied agency in a technologically mediated world.
MAXMachina Artist Profile
Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer, media designer, and creative technologist. Her work spans interactive installations, media design, performance and robotics. She researches bodies in motion and how they impact and are impacted by systems of social and technological pressure. Ladenheim holds an M.F.A. in Media Design Practices from ArtCenter College of Design. She has conducted research in motion interfaces for robotics design at U.C.L.A., and was the 2019-2020 Artist in Residence at the Robotics, Automation, & Dance Lab at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Her artistic projects have been presented internationally, including at The Invisible Dog, National Sawdust, GrizzlyGrizzly, Brown University, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and The Performance Arcade (New Zealand). Her work has been celebrated in Dance Magazine as one of their “25 to Watch” and “Best of 2018.”