Charged Objects of Performance: Amplifying Materiality, Movement and Interaction through XR

While devising and making costume together, a co-creative collective of Yoruba and Pan-African textile artists and makers adopted a mixture of new and old technologies, the resulting performance of the Yoruba mythical Queen Moremi Ajasoro, captured to be immersively digitally re-preformed for an intergenerational Yoruba diaspora museum audience, challenged the limits of volumetric capture technologies. Engaging multiple physical/material and digital processes to explore the power of this diasporic African dance, drumming and textiles, the Charged Objects of Performance research project produced interdisciplinary co-creation that foregrounded seldom performed stories from a vital cultural practice. Key co-creators; performer Fumy Opeyemi, composer Helen Epega and percussionist Richard Olatunde with a collective of intergenerational, diasporic makers, advanced recent research on the criticality of Yoruba performance practices (Bakare and Barbieri, 2023).

Certain challenges encountered in the volumetric, three-dimensional space, asked for digitally crafted solutions addressing the balance between a desire for hi-fidelity vision and colour saturated, texture detailed performance capture, with the computational resources we had at our disposal. Our paper reflects on the processes by which different technologies can be used holistically to define and enhance significant culturally specific dance, to bring to life ideas and performances present in the archive in the space of the museum, aiming for an authentic 4D (Jiang et al, 2023) performance space-time context. The interaction and relationship will be a digital resource with specific culturally situated, co-created material and performance values, key to the process of bringing digital humans into physical spaces and creating meaningful, memorable hybrid experiences.

• https://xrnetworkplus.xrstories.co.uk/pr...