It’s a tender weaving of Roxana Barba’s Peruvian roots and the post-human world of the future, fusing contemporary dance and technology to create a 50-minute performance titled “In my center, a cyborg seed.”
The work will be performed at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18 and Saturday, Oct. 19 at MAD Arts, an immersive art museum in Dania Beach.
Miami-based Barba says her inspiration came from two sources – her Peruvian ancestry and the philosophical question of what comes after the human race?
“There are post-human authors that got me thinking about this idea: What would it mean being something that’s beyond human?,” she says. “It’s part philosophy, but there’s a current, science fiction element.”
Barba says she applied to the Knight Foundation because they were funding projects that integrated technology. She received a $30,000 Knight New Work grant for 2022.
“My piece proposed, in a sci-fi way, to see how we can reimagine the future by reimagining technology and using new tools such as motion tracking,” she says.
Additionally, in 2024, she received a $10,000 grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Fund for the Arts.
Barba assembled a team of artists from Miami, Palm Beach and Berlin, Germany. In the summer of 2023, dancers, a programmer and a musician held exploratory rehearsals to try out ideas about a cyborg and what that concept meant.
Barba says she also found inspiration in Pallar Moche, an ancestral oracle that takes the form of a black and white bean. The oracle is associated with women and rituals such as giving birth, but it also was used as an oracle by ancestors to ask about the future, she says.
“So this cyborg that I’m imagining is totally connected to this ancestral oracle that imagines the future, but with an ancestral wisdom embedded in it,” says Barba. “It’s been a wild exercise to try to bring all of these ideas together, and at the same time bring artists from different disciplines together to create a work.”
Barba was familiar with Dania Beach’s MAD Arts, a museum, exhibit and event space that has collaborated with contemporary artists creating works that integrate technology.
“I visited MAD Arts, and they were already so familiar with the new tools I was interested in exploring. It made sense for me to approach them, to see if they would be interested in presenting a performance there,” she says.
Marc Aptakin is co-founder of MAD Arts, a nonprofit that is part of Yes, We Are Mad, an advertising agency he has run for more than 20 years. It’s all housed in a 50,000 square-foot space with modular walls that are adjusted to host exhibits, performances and administrative offices.
“The nonprofit side of what we do, which is MAD Arts, is really here to help artists like Roxana — mid-career or emerging artists — and help them gain access to this kind of tech to bring projects like hers to life faster than she’d be able to do without engaging with us,” says Aptakin. “We help artists with non-tech stuff, too, but because of all the tech stuff we do, we seem to get a lot of artists who want to play with tech.”
Barba’s creative process began with intimate meetings with two dancers, Britney Tokumoto of Delray Beach and Lize-Lotte Pitlo of Cutler Bay, where she shared the philosophy she wanted to impart in the work.
Then when her creative team gathered at MAD Arts for four days in 2023, the musician recorded breath work and words and began looping them in a studio there , layering them to explore elements that they could use in the production.
This “is what those exploratory rehearsals are for,” says Barba. “It’s been a process, and I often work in that way. I devote a lot to the research piece.”
Barba moved to motion tracking. “MAD Arts also helps artists with some of their technological tools, so they have this equipment where you can either record facial gestures and movements or body movements and transfer them into basic information, like skeletons or lines, that you can ‘dress,’” she says. “It’s a concept used in animated movies and video games.”
The technology was used to create the show’s opening, which symbolizes a lullaby that ancestors are singing to welcome the cyborgs. In her work, Barba weaves elements of her heritage with a vision for the future.
Born and raised in Peru, Barba said she has spent the past five years researching iconic Peruvian symbols like vases. The results are seen in the performance.
“An ancestral vase was sculpted into 3D and animated spatially. I recorded my facial movement singing the lullaby that the composer wrote. So when the piece opens, we have these vases that are animated, and they’re singing using an AI (artificial intelligence) voice. It’s not a real voice,” says Barba. “So the use of visuals matured with time as we progressed with the work.”
She draws parallels between ancestral symbols and a post-human society.
“When I think of a cyborg, meaning a cyborg that may be part human, part animal, part electricity, my mind goes to these ancestral textiles, where you see these anthropomorphic figures already existing, already marrying, a serpent with a jaguar and a human body,” says Barba. “So that vase is symbolically holding all of that wisdom leading to the cyborg.”
Barba says she wanted her work to impart the themes of life and death, of constructing and deconstructing. She also plays with the concept of language, using words in the work to show that technology is not only a gadget, but a language itself.
“I wanted to break down language so that it also feels like it’s being deconstructed,” she says. “Hopefully it gives people some ideas about how language also plays a role in how we relate to each other and how we would relate to each other in the future, and maybe how non-humans would establish some sort of language.”
The 50-minute performance includes admission to the MAD Arts museum.
“Overall, it’s a dance performance. It has some live interactive elements, but the dancers are really the driving force. It’s like they activate the space and then the elements in the space join them to create something that takes on a life of its own,” says Barba. “It’s a really beautiful experience. I’m happy to share it and hopefully get audiences in Broward County to experience it as well.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT : “In my center, a cyborg seed” by Roxana Barba
WHERE: MAD Arts, 481 S. Federal Highway, Dania Beach
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18 and Sunday, Oct. 19
TICKETS: $30 includes museum admission
INFORMATION: (754) 239-0707,
www.roxanabarba.com
or
www.yeswearemadarts.com
