Newport Art Museum announces acclaimed choreographer and Director of Brown Arts Institute, Sydney Skybetter, as a featured lecturer in their Winter Speaker Series 2025. The lecture, entitled Clock, Fall: A Brief History and Speculative Future of Dancing Murder Robots, will take place on February 15 from 2-4PM at 76 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, RI and online through Vimeo. Tickets are $25 for museum members, $30 for non-members, and can be purchased at https://newportartmuseum.org/events/winter-speaker-series-2025-sydney-skybetter.

Sydney Skybetter is an expert in choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which he has pioneered at the interdisciplinary intersection of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning. Choreorobotics offers a rich, critical aperture to consider how bodies in motion – human or otherwise – move through space and time to generate meaning. In Clock, Fall, Skybetter dives into the origin of choreorobotics, recent advancements in the field, and how emerging technologies can be informed or disrupted by collective action and coalition building, drawing from his work as the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and podcast, “Dances with Robots.” In this presentation, Skybetter will cover topics ranging from Boston Dynamics robots, Tesla’s “Party Mode” and Optimus robots, parasitic aesthetic theory, the movie M3GAN, Artificial Intelligence, and a little bit of Beyoncé.

The lecture will be held in person at the Museum and virtually on Vimeo, and will be followed by audience Q&A and tea reception.

Lecture recording will be available to subscribers and ticket holders.