Kevin Peter He: Vestige

Two performers search for contact across stage and screen in a magnetic live dance-theatre work about presence, absence and touch. Uncanny and intimate, Vestige is a multimedia performance that explores our impulse to reach toward the unknown, and what happens when the unknown begins to respond. A mysterious instrument draws a performer into a ritualistic encounter with her digital double. Guided by touch and movement, the virtual body gradually takes on a life of its own. Across stage and screen, their duet shifts between control, imitation, resistance and entanglement, as each begins to reshape the other. Combining contemporary dance, motion capture, live virtual imagery and mechanical instrumentation, Vestige unfolds as a theatre of automation. In a world where presence is increasingly mediated by cameras, machines and agentic code, the work considers how our sense of agency changes when the systems we create begin to learn from, respond to and transform us. The performance runs for approximately 45 minutes, followed by a five-minute reset and a 20-minute post-show talk moderated by Jazia Hammoudi of PACT, Planetary Art Culture Technology. Outside of performance times, the motion capture studio used by the performers becomes an interactive installation for you to explore. Kevin Peter He is a New York-based artist and director working across performance, installation and cinematic media. His live virtual cinema practice examines how systems of progress reshape perception,