The UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television presents acclaimed choreographer and Director of Brown Arts Institute, Sydney Skybetter, as a featured speaker on May 20, 2025 at 6pm. The free lecture – entitled Clock, Fall– will take place at Kaufman Hall, Room 208. For more information, visit https://www.tft.ucla.edu/events/clock-fall-a-lecture-by-sydney-skybetter/.

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 the relationships between dance history, emerging technologies of embodied artificial intelligence and next -generation space habitations. 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, microgravity performance and a little bit of Beyoncé.

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

The UCLA Center for Performance Studies (CPS) brings together faculty, staff, artists, and students from across UCLA and beyond for whom an intellectual and/or artistic focus on the performance paradigm can be a valuable mode of analysis or encounter. Since its founding in 2005 by Professor Emerita Sue-Ellen Case, CPS has received the support of the Deans of the School of Theater, Film, and Television, the School of Arts and Architecture, the College of the Humanities, and the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor. Today, CPS hosts significant research projects by faculty and students, organizes seminar series, and sponsors a biannual graduate conference organized by UCLA graduate students. Our mission is to dynamize performance studies and build communities around cutting edge intellectual and interdisciplinary work. We welcome inquiries from any UCLA affiliates and community partners interested in participating. https://www.tft.ucla.edu/research-centers/center-for-performance-studies/