Renowned dance company AΦE opens unique creative space in Chatham to explore theatre and art both physically and in the Metaverse

Theatre has always intended escapism. At its apex it’s offering a place to immerse yourself into a different world, to laugh, to cry, to fall in love with a character or even just a line in a play. At its most basic, it is entertainment.

But now a progressive dance company from Kent is redefining how we think of theatre, blurring the lines between real and virtual reality and exactly how an audience participates in a performance.

AΦE Company has just opened its brand-new creative space in the Central Boiler House in the Historic Dockyard, Chatham.

Founded by professional dancers Aoi Nakamura (Japanese) and Esteban Lecoq (French), it will be known as the A+E Lab, complete with its own bespoke sprung dance floor and ‘hi-tech’ garden. But far from being focused solely on dance, the Lab will be used for skill development, creation, performances and professional arts business networking meetings – it will even have artists in residence.

Having only opened in June, one of the first artists in residence was modern puppeteering group Half A String by Peter Morton, who used the Lab to work on new production Breathe, which will then be shown during a private premiere.

“We want to create an exchange where you have a professional artist creating their own work for a week or two weeks, a month,” says Esteban. “And in exchange for giving them the space for free, we ask them to exchange with the community living here, either through workshops or through sharing, or however they want to.

“We create performances, one day it will be on stage, another it will be in VR. We are always trying to find new ways of telling stories and expressing ideas”

“We want to curate from different friends that we have in fashion, visual art, architecture and interior design. We wanted a space that was just as flexible as possible and we’re working with the dockyard to bring world-renowned artists to perform and exhibit here.”

More recently, they hosted the UK’s first Choreographic Coding Lab, bringing tech heads and movement hackers from across the world to study the translation of choreography and dance into digital form, led by Scott Delahunta and Daniel Bisig from the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University and Motion Bank (how you get into that, we have no idea!).

“There were only 20 spots. We had a guy from Microsoft and people from America coming here. They are professional coders looking at movement of bodies in space, looking at motion tracking, artificial intelligence, sensors and all sorts.”

Aoi and Esteban have spent 15 years performing with renowned dance and immersive theatre companies such as Punchdrunk, Jasmin Vardimon Company and State Theatre Kassel and have recently been on a world tour with their own production WHIST, which itself merges physical theatre, virtual reality, technology and visual arts. It invites the audience to delve into the dreams and fears of an unusual family through 360° film and 3D sound. Audiences wear a VR headset and get transported into a series of dance performances where boundaries between the conscious and unconscious are blurred.

“We were the UK’s first dance company to tour internationally with VR and AR productions,” says Aoi. “As trailblazers in our sector, we want to rethink live performances. Our uniqueness lies in the use of technology to completely reinvent audience participation.”

The Lab, which is fully rigged and specced with high-end audio and visual capabilities, will also provide a space for AΦE Company to continue its own endeavours.

Having lived in the UK for 15 years, the pair started creating their own work about six years ago, producing a huge and varied range of projects.

Having opened AΦE Creative Hub, the dance company’s charitable arm in 2020, its first event was in 2021 – an outdoor interactive digital art programme called ALT*ASH, which took place during lockdown in Ashford’s High Street, engaging 29,000 live audiences and 139,000 online audiences. Members of the public could bring posters to life through augmented reality with segments of the opera The Cunning Little Vixen, commissioned by Welsh National Opera and created by Arcade with illustrations from Xavier Segers.

They also brought in Naho Matsuda’s EVERY THING EVERY TIME, found at the entrance of Ashford Picturehouse, which would broadcast poetry captured from interactions and data on a large mechanical display, urging deeper reflection on the role of data in our lives and personal privacy.

Following this, AΦE became Associate Artists of the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries (ICCI) with the University of Kent and moved into the hub at Historic Dockyard Chatham in autumn 2021.

While they continue to work on new projects, one that has been bubbling away has been the creation of Lilith, a story-based NFT, a new experience between the real and digital worlds through storytelling. Born in digital space, shaped through simulation and transgressing digital lines through live performance, Lilith represents an ongoing and evolving physio-digital performer.

“We create performances, one day it will be on stage, another it will be on VR. We are always trying to find new ways of telling stories and expressing ideas,” says Esteban.

Aoi adds: “Technology is only a tool to create what you imagine and vision.”

But while they continue to work with the likes of tech giants Epson, Esteban argues that it’s not actually the technology that inspires them, it’s the people.

“We want to bring it all here, that’s the aim. Not only the hardware, but the people and the knowledge. I can go to Tesco and buy a tablet, but I cannot buy their knowledge. It’s more interesting to us, to bring experts from different fields and exchange with professionals, amateurs and kids – and for them to learn and experience.

“I think to have an environment where creative people are working on their own projects from different fields is really inspiring.”

INFO: http://www.aoiesteban.com/

INSTA: @aoiesteban / @aelab.uk