How, in the near future, can the boundaries of the body and its identity be redefined? Eve 2050 invites audiences to engage in an artistic, aesthetic and ethical reflection on the future of human beings and the body in an age of digital technology, biomedical advances and artificial intelligence. Combining dance, video, music, visual and digital arts, the work takes on various forms to be presented in theatres, public spaces and online. The work has three components, which establish different types of relationships with the audience: an interactive webseries, an interactive installation with choreographic performances and a stage production.

The web series Eve 2050 blends the real bodies of dancers with their virtual doubles, giving birth to Eve through a metaphysical tale in five episodes. Posted on YouTube, Snapchat, Vimeo and other platforms, the episodes redirect visitors to eve2050.com. This digital platform, especially designed to compile all the information that went into the creation of the triptych Eve 2050, will provide access to an interactive version of the web series, in which Internet users are immersed in an experience that engages their own body via their webcam. Each person weaves their journey to Eve’s, intimately participating in her story.

Designed to exist autonomously or as part of a performance, the installation Eve 2050 features alternative scenarios to the web series on three interactive holographic panels and two sculptures. Set up in a gallery, the panels generate five digital environments that show five facets of Eve, inviting visitors to discover her world.

In the stage production Eve 2050, eight performers control an immersive, interactive environment that evokes a connected humanity, where multiple possibilities coexist: genetic mutations, cohabitation of human and artificial intelligences, dreams of immortality, digital survival…Driven by reflections on the advances in AI, this concluding part of the EVE 2050 project points to the advent of a new species, a new take on the eternal question of our place in the mystery of the cosmos.

Through its three components, Eve 2050 combines the vibrant force of actual physical presence with the magical transformations and ubiquity made possible by technology. Nature and culture are reconciled in this meeting between the primal body—its ancestral heritage expressed through a visceral gestural vocabulary—and the body of the future, transformed by its connection with technology.

Eve 2050 is a particularly innovative project in its artistic use of digital technologies. It is based on a novel association of different image analysis and processing applications, movement sensing systems, and the latest interactive technologies. Most of the visual effects that transform Eve in the web series are generated in real time by interactive technology, not in post-production. This process makes it possible to reproduce the same effects on the bodies of spectators who are exploring the digital installation, and on the dancers performing the work on stage. Technology is used in the service of dance, creating a unique experience for each spectator.

Slow down. Come in close, encounter yourself, fall into another dimension. With the interactive installation Corps secret / Corps public, the trio of Isabelle Van Grimde, Anick La Bissonnière and Thom Gossage combine movement, architecture and sound to transform our everyday environment and to challenge how we use images and time.

Three intriguing structures inhabit the Espace culturel Georges Émile Lapalme at Place des Arts. Flexible and translucent, their walls are a mirror skin where our reflection merges with the reflections of other strangers in transit… and with the reflections of the dancers during performances in an enticing hybridization of bodies, a parallel narrative that adjusts to changing rhythms. An impromptu dance takes shape in the instant of our interrupted journey; looks are exchanged. The wondrous visual fusion of our identities varies depending on the light. Captured by sensors, each of our movements modulates the soundtrack, recomposing the rustling and murmurs of an almost supernatural urban jungle. A portal opens up into reality and we are propelled into the space-time of an elsewhere that is in the here and now.

A production by Van Grimde Corps Secrets. In coproduction with Festival TransAmériques, Place des Arts, Anick La Bissonnière and l’École supérieure de ballet du Québec. Creatives Residencies at Place des Arts and Agora de la danse. Van Grimde Corps Secrets is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts (CAC), the Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM) and by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) for this production and through its program to aid in the deployment of digital infrastructure.

A cross between choreography, spatial and acoustic architecture, exhibition and interactive digital technology, The Body in Question(s)2 explores the ways in which the massive social, cultural and technological changes in modern societies are affecting how we conceptualize and interpret the body. Transforming the seven rooms of Enterprise Square Galleries in Edmonton, Isabelle Van Grimde has created an organic space that she invites us to inhabit rather than pass through. Within it, she sets up a dialogue between the living body and its genome, its digital conversion, its virtual image and oneiric dimension. She instils tension between the primitive body and the future body, pondering the status of the physical body in an increasingly virtual world, and the impact of computers on our mental and physical processes. This questioning becomes all the more poignant, since a digital platform allows visitors to get a live, behind-the-scenes view of the creation and to make a web recreation of the very work that surrounds them. From one room to the next, visitors discover works by nine visual and media artists, essays by two scientists, and the subtle movements of six dancers aged 23 to 60. Video installations relay their performances in the rooms they no longer occupy, maintaining a constant choreographic presence in the exhibition. Defying the notions of space and time, this intriguing work uses the viewer’s body to reinvent itself. An intimate experience whose duration and nature is determined by each visitor.