School of Dance
2024-25 Awarded Amount: $14,188
Title: How to Choreograph with Drones: A Dance and Computer Science Collaboration
Principal Investigators
Eric Handman, School of Dance
Erik Brunvand, Kahlert School of Computing
Project Goals
The project 'How to Choreograph with Drones' was a collaboration between Eric Handman from the School of Dance, Erik Brunvand from the Kahlert School of Computing, Scotty Hardwig from the Virginia Tech School of Performing Arts and Zach Duer from the Virginia Tech School of Visual Arts. The goal of this project was to understand the creative, practical, ethical and pedagogical challenges of using drones in live performance through various teaching and learning experiences. The central question — “how to choreograph with drones?” implied another: “what responsibilities do we have when working with technologies that carry both real-world risk and symbolic weight?” These questions were framed to foster conversations between dancers and computer science students.
The collaboration aimed to:
- Engage Computer Science students in an interdisciplinary dialogue that foregrounds shared concepts with Dance and Choreography.
- Develop ethical pedagogical approaches to train dancers for performing with robotic devices.
- Integrate bespoke physical practices with dramaturgical and production strategies needed to perform safely with drones.
Process
The collaboration connected three major interests: pedagogical practice, interinstitutional/interdisciplinary exchange, and creative process.
Pedagogical Practice
A teaching priority of the project focused on two levels of performer training:
- Physical Training Without Drones – Dancers were introduced to evasive movement and floor-based locomotive exercises designed to prepare them for dodging unexpected drone interactions and avoiding collisions. These embodied exercises emphasized enhanced physical agility, improvisation, rapid changes in levels, directions, and coordination patterns.
- Drone Tutorials – A series of short, progressively challenging tutorials was designed to acclimate dancers to moving in shared spaces with drones. These tutorials emphasized heightened situational awareness and adapting to the direction, altitude, and velocity of drones to interact with them—skills crucial to avoiding collisions and maintaining theatrical continuity.
Both training formats supported the ethical premise of the project: that human-digital interactivity in performance is not just a matter of aesthetic judgment but of attention, situational awareness, responsibility, and care.
Inter-institutional/Interdisciplinary Exchange
An integrative lecture-demonstration with approximately forty (40) Computer Science students (CS3710 Computer Design Lab) was held during a dance creative process rehearsal. Virginia Tech-based guest artists Scotty Hardwig and Zach Duer introduced the concepts, questions, practices, and discoveries that evolved from working with drones as performers in live theater. Computer Science students had the opportunity to interact physically with the dancers via several improvisational scores focusing on spatial paths, synchrony, timing, group behaviors, and emergent complexity.
This interaction helped shift perspectives from seeing drone choreography as only a software or path-planning problem to recognizing it as a site of embodied and ethical inquiry. The question 'how to choreograph with drones?' led to improvisation games and structures that embodied how emergent systems respond to and shape human movement behavior.
Creative Process
Rehearsals are also teaching environments. These rehearsals served as laboratories to explore how drone movement could be perceived as 'alive' and responsive, and how dancers might develop new physical strategies to cohabit the space with drones. The team approached drones as co-performers with distinct presences, limitations, and capacities.
Through improvisational scores and iterative testing, we arrived at a set of compositional strategies that enhanced the lifelike quality of drones on stage. These compositional strategies are now teachable content for preparing future dancers as well as informing computer engineers and production teams for drone-interactive performances.
Outcomes
Pedagogical
- Introduced a multi-step training approach for preparing dancers to work with drones.
- Demonstrated how physical preparation and tutorials contribute to safety, expression, and ethical awareness.
- Built a framework for further curricular development in dance-technology intersections.
Interdisciplinary
- Fostered ethical awareness about the aesthetic and social consequences of robotic technology used in rehearsal and performance.
- Rehearsal and performance spaces as embodied testing grounds for moving technology.
- Encouraged future technologists to view dance not only as an application area but as a site of critical inquiry.
Artistic
- Generated content for the stage that centers drone-human co-agency.
- Developed new compositional strategies for suggesting “aliveness” in drone behavior.
- Clarified dramaturgical possibilities for both dancers and drones.
Conclusion
This grant from the Council of Dee Fellows made possible a nuanced exploration of drone-human performance through this inter-institutional/interdisciplinary collaboration. Through various teaching scenarios (2 masterclasses, 1 lecture/demonstration, 10 rehearsals, and 8 performances) guests from Virginia Tech shared insights into drone coding, physical preparation, and ethical production practices for indoor drone performances. By treating the creative process as a teaching opportunity for artistic, technical, and ethical questions, the project bridged disciplines and laid important groundwork for future inquiry.
