Zelia ZZ Tan

REfract is a hybrid performance that explores how bodies transform as they move between physical and computational worlds. A solo dancer performs alongside live avatars whose movements emerge through motion capture, real-time rendering, and procedural animation. Rather than treating technology as a visual effect or extension of the performer, the work positions digital systems as choreographic partners that reshape movement, perception, and agency.

The performance unfolds within a digital desert populated by floating letters and shifting landscapes—a speculative environment where memory, language, and embodiment continually refract through one another. Refraction, understood as the bending of light and sound, becomes both a physical phenomenon and a metaphor for the ways identities are translated, fragmented, and reassembled across human and performance systems. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the Apparatus of Capture, the work asks what becomes of the body when movement is transformed into data, and how choreography might resist reduction by generating new forms of relational presence.

The research is rooted in my lived experience of migration, cultural translation, and embodied memory. Rather than presenting technology as a replacement for human presence, REfract investigates how computational mediation can deepen questions of intimacy, vulnerability, and care. The avatars are not digital doubles or obedient replicas. They gradually acquire their own rhythm, behavior, and autonomy, existing somewhere between extension, companion, memory, and future possibility. Through improvisation, the choreography negotiates moments where agency shifts between dancer and system, challenging conventional distinctions between author and tool, subject and object.

Audience participation forms an essential part of this ecology. They are invited to navigate the evolving relationship between performer, virtual bodies, and space, experiencing identity as something multiple, unstable, and continually negotiated rather than fixed. Presence becomes distributed across bodies, projections, algorithms, and spectators, creating a shared environment where perception itself becomes choreographic.

REfract contributes to an emerging language of hybrid performance in which choreography functions not only as movement composition but also as a method for thinking through hybrid performance systems. By bringing together dance, real-time media, and embodied interaction, the work proposes a future where human and machine coexist through responsiveness rather than control. It asks how technologies shaped by artificial intelligence might become spaces for empathy, imagination, and collective care, inviting audiences to reconsider what it means to inhabit more than one body, more than one presence, and more than one possible future.

About the Artist

Zelia ZZ Tan is a choreographer, media artist, and artistic researcher whose practice explores how movement reshapes relationships between bodies, technology, and living environments. Working across performance and interactive installation, she investigate on presence, the evolving agency of human and computational systems. Her research asks how dance can become a method for sensing, questioning, and imagining new forms of coexistence.

She holds an MFA in Choreography and Interactive Media for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts, and is the co-founder of TechDanceLab. Her works have been presented internationally, including commissions and collaborations with the City Contemporary Dance Company, West Kowloon Cultural District, Goethe-Institut, T.H.E Dance Company, and Cie Gilles Jobin. Her hybrid performance REfract will be presented in the Spatial Storytelling program at SIGGRAPH 2026. Through writing, and interdisciplinary collaboration, she continues to develop choreographic languages where human, machine, and ecological intelligences meet with curiosity, care, and imagination.