T.H.E Dance Company dances with digital avatar in new tech-driven work

SINGAPORE – For its return to the Singapore International Festival of Arts after its landmark As It Fades in 2011, The Human Expression Dance Company has opted for something a little less human.

In keeping with the times, it has spared no expense investing in software Move AI, setting up 10 cameras at its Goodman Arts Centre studio and working with a local tech team to create a larger-than-life avatar.

This transcendent being also possesses a “physical body” – a movable machine with an LED screen that will serve as projector for the creation.

Strangely Familiar is a hybrid dance imagining the encounter between five dancers and an otherworldly ecosystem. As Singapore goes full steam ahead in embracing artificial intelligence (AI), artistic director Kuik Swee Boon is seeking a more hopeful, poetic vision.

“I wanted to find a solution. Technology is part of our culture and this is a new era,” the soft-spoken Kuik says after a rehearsal at its studio.

He calls it transculturation, the reciprocal exchange when two cultures meet. But in looking forward, he is also harking back to a third, primordial strain.

“Slowly I realised that (modern culture and technology) wasn’t enough, so I brought back the old ways of animism as well. It’s really important in helping us relearn how to respect the small, insignificant thing.”

This influence is made explicit in the digital avatar Aagaya, a Tamil word associated with the lotus. Her ethereal skin is translucent and she carries flora in her body. “She is equally capable of carrying life,” Kuik says.

Strangely Familiar premiered at Hong Kong’s East Kowloon Cultural Centre in November 2025, co-commissioned by the East Asian city’s Asia+ Festival and Sifa.

There, US and Hong Kong-based Chinese dancer Zelia ZZ Tan was the dancer behind the avatar, picking up the choreography in Singapore in two weeks before recording at an AI studio in Los Angeles, United States.

But Kuik wanted to improve the movements and gain greater control over the process for this iteration. The version by T.H.E Dance Company dancer Chang En will strengthen the interaction between the dancers and the digital being.

Kuik, who spent 10 years dancing for the Singapore Dance Theatre and was the first Asian male principal dancer with Madrid’s Compania Nacional De Danza (Spain’s National Dance Company), founded T.H.E Dance Company in 2008.

His signature HollowBody methodology requires a journey into the inner self and an alignment of heart, body and mind – “deconstruction and reconstruction to help us unpack or rebuild our relationship with dance”, he says.

It becomes more critical with this production that requires dancers – and audiences – to leave their preconceived ideas of technology at the door. “We need to be honest first. We need to be sincere first. I tell my dancers to be like scientists. We cannot have our opinions first. Be neutral, sit at the centre.”

Developing a shared artistic language with AI has not been easy, he admits, but a curiosity about the ever-changing relationship between human and technology keeps him going.

In his translucent design of the avatar is also a hope: that any future being will be equally amenable to his HollowBody methodology.

And if “weird movement” is what emerges, it suits Kuik just fine. During rehearsals, dancers’ movements have a soft jaggedness to them, a graceful glitching. “You become creatures. You become your own strangers. There’s a little bit of robotic movements, but we didn’t set out purposely to create them. The movements come to sit in our body.”

Book it/Strangely Familiar

Where: Victoria Theatre, 9 Empress Place
When: May 22 and 23, 8pm; and May 24, 2pm
Admission: $38 and $48
Info: str.sg/7CXB