The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) celebrates its 10th year with an annual gathering at Brown University, June 12–14, 2025, in Providence, Rhode Island. This year’s themes explore the intersections of choreography, performance, and emerging technologies of the body in environments beyond Earth. How might live performance and arts research take shape in microgravity? Given the colonial imperatives of space exploration, how can rethinking terrestrial creative practices contribute to justice work? For more information, visit https://www.choreographicinterfaces.org/work/crci-2025-moondance.

CRCI 2025: Moondance marks a new phase in CRCI’s coalitional endeavors; a move to wield creative practices for more equitable futures on, and beyond, our planet.

CRCI 2025 Agenda

Thursday, June 12th

5pm-6pm: CRCI Conference Welcome Reception

7pm-9pm: CRCI Presents: COMMIT! by Kate Ladenheim

Friday, June 13th

9am-10am: CRCI Conference: Welcome Breakfast & Check-In

10:15am-10:30am: Welcome

10:30am-11:30am: Whose Frontier? Rethinking Space, Power, and Possibility

11:45am-12:30pm: COMMIT! Talkback/Q&A

11:45am-12:30pm: Movement in Microgravity Workshop: Preparing the body for altered states, RSVP Needed

12:30pm-2:30pm: BREAK

2:30pm-3:15pm: Fast Talks

3:30pm-4:30pm: How to Put On a Show…in Outer Space

5:30pm-6:30pm: Voyage of Memories, RSVP Needed

6:30pm-7pm: Happy Hour

7pm-9pm: Screening of Wall-E, with live commentary

Saturday, June 14th

9am-10:30am: Day 2 Breakfast

10:30am-11:30am: The Revolution Will Not Be Orbitalized: Experiments, Alliances, and Other Necessary Mischief

11:30am-12:30pm: Biofeedback Soundbath, RSVP Needed

11:30am-12:30pm: How to dance with and rapidly deactivate a robot workshop…if it’s surveilling you, which it probably is, RSVP Needed

12:30pm-2:30pm: BREAK

2:30pm-3:15pm: Celebrating 10 Years: Slapstuck, Reprise

3:30pm-4:45pm: Conversation Groups

5pm: Conference Wrap-Up & Thank Yous

Public-Facing Events

Masterclass with Laila J Franklin

June 9, 2025 at 10am

Location: Ballet RI

Price: Suggested donation of $15 (all proceeds go directly to the artists)

This class is interested in the ethos of working in microgravity, exploring the intersection of virtuosity, risk-taking, and care through structures of collective support and encouragement. We will begin with a group warm up to tune in to the space and the collective and build warmth in our bodies and in the air. We will move through solo, duo, and group improvisatory tasks that help generate the sensation of orbiting and floating. We will finish with phrase work that imagines the sensation of microgravity through suspension, falling, turning, and leaping. Registration is available here.

This class will be taught at an intermediate/advanced level. lailajfranklin.com/home.

Masterclass with Sasha Peterson

June 10, 2025 at 10am

Location: Ballet RI

Price: Suggested donation of $15 (all proceeds go directly to the artists)

Under the umbrella of research gathered in CRCI’s Immersive Residency, this class will cultivate listening, curiosity, and expansion through process with ourselves, our connection with others, and the many layers of space that surround us. A guided warmup, series of improvisational scores, and phrasework will challenge us to sink into (or rather float in) and explore different embodiments and dynamics, honing in on perceived aspects of bodily awareness and choice making in earthly to lesser gravity environments. Registration is available here.

This class will be taught at an intermediate/advanced level. sashapeterson.com.

Masterclass with Michael Figueroa

June 11, 2025 at 10am

Location: The Lindemann Performing Arts Center

Price: Suggested donation of $15 (all proceeds go directly to the artists)

Class begins with a warm-up that blends structured and improvised exercises to activate your kinesthetic and spatial awareness while fostering a connection to everyday, pedestrian movement. We’ll focus on grounding—connecting to the floor, to ourselves, and to one another. I’ll offer a choreographed sequence that invites space for personal improvisation. Inspired by the imagined sensation of dancing in zero gravity and insights from our first immersive residency in March, the class will explore themes of fluidity, weightlessness, and dynamic motion. Registration is available here.

This class will be taught at an intermediate/advanced level. www.ruckus-dance.org.

COMMIT! by Kate Ladenheim

June 12, 2025 at 7pm

Location: The Lindemann Performing Arts Center

Price: This performance is included with conference registration – tickets to the public for only this event are free

COMMIT! is an interactive performance in which a performer (Ladenheim) executes hundreds of dramatic falls in an hour, while the audience uses a web app to vote on whether they believe the performer has truly committed. After rounds of falling, an avatar replica of Ladenheim reads the audience’s feedback aloud, while the live performer adjusts their actions in response. Throughout, motion capture and custom sensors collect data on each fall in an attempt to discover (and justify) the most “committed” fall there is. Using gamified interactions to control a durational performance, COMMIT! explores the shifting boundaries between technological control and societal expectations. Through the performer’s repeated attempts to “commit,” the piece highlights tensions between physical effort and digital representation, as well as the audience’s role in shaping and judging the performer’s actions. In this way, COMMIT! critiques societal pressures to demonstrate resilience, adaptability, and perfection. The work emphasizes the inexact and often reductive nature of data collection and digital mediation, inviting reflection on how technology distorts and constrains identity and agency. COMMIT! is led by Kate Ladenheim, and made in collaboration with media artist Mollye Bendell and production technician Timothy Kelly. Registration is available here.

The project received support from the Media Design Practices Postgraduate Fellowship at ArtCenter College of Design, the Barnard Movement Lab, the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance, and the MAXmachina Lab grant. www.kateladenheim.com/

Kate Ladenheim, Mollye Bendell and Timothy Kelly in conversation with Michelle Ellsworth

June 13, 2025 at 11:45am

Location: The Lindemann Performing Arts Center

Kate Ladenheim and collaborators Mollye Bendell and Timothy kelly will join acclaimed performance artist Michelle Ellsworth for a Q&A talkback following her performance of COMMIT!

The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) explores the braid of choreography, computation, and surveillance through an interdisciplinary lens. Our aim is to counter the violence of body-surveilling and algorithmic technologies by channeling resources to artists, organizers and scholars who center bodies and computation in their work for social justice. CRCI engages the expertise of a wildly diverse and intimidatingly heterogeneous group of critics, theorists, computer scientists, dancers, roboticists, ethnographers, poets, designers, improvisers, and organizers, among others. We develop programming that makes time and space for sustained dialogue and collaborative movement, traversing disparate frames of knowledge. In doing this, CRCI aims to create curriculum and community committed to making productive interventions in the development of emerging art and technologies. These interventions can take the form of creative works, curricular design, human / computer and human / robot interfaces, publications, and conversations. Our intention is to expand this work to foster equitably collaborative research projects, policy work, and expansive digital programming.

The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) was founded by Sydney Skybetter at Brown University in 2015 to consider the intrinsic risks and creative possibilities of surveillant computational systems. The convening’s participants– with expertise in choreography, digital art, interface design, hardware hacking, ethnography, data science, facilitation and software design– gather annually to collectively consider productive interventions in emerging technologies with the belief that bringing artistic intelligences to engineering will make the world more equitable, sustainable, and embracing of creative discourse.

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob’s Pillow. He has lectured at the University of Cambridge, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, a frequent contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, “Dances with Robots.” Sydney serves as the Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Institute, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.

www.skybetter.org.

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