Navigating control and illusion: functional interactivity versus ‘faux-interactivity’ in transmedia dance performance

Interactivity – a networked loop in which a performer’s live data feeds a digital system – can bridge the divide between live performance and digital entities in transmedia dance performances. In the ‘entanglement scene’ of Australian Dance Theatre’s Multiverse (2014), choreographer Garry Stewart and the creative coders and animators at the Deakin Motion.Lab utilise ‘faux-interactivity’, or a perceived relationship between the dancers and digital entities that exists only from the perspective of the audience. The spectre of ‘faux-interactivity’ challenges the spontaneity in live, embodied performance art because it both integrates live performance with prerendered digital content and offers a potential structure for a shared, dispersed creative and choreographic process across numerous and shared artistic and technological platforms. This paper investigates the concept of ‘faux-interactivity’, suggesting that its use can be a catalyst for moving beyond the limitations and values of ‘real’, or functional interactive systems within a theatrical context, and positing that definitions of ‘interactivity’ might be further expanded to accommodate the shifting timelines inherent in the disparate creative processes of human performance and coding.