NoCap – Dancing with Data

In NoCap – Dancing with Data we question how motion capture technologies shape and constrain the ways in which bodies are represented on stage. The performance begins with a simple yet disruptive gesture: removing the Rokoko Smartsuit from the dancer and making it the central performer. This shift opened up an unexpected space of inquiry. Detached from the body, the suit’s sensors still produced data streams that could be redirected into generative visual environments. Through this process, the performance evolved into a ‘dance with data’: a choreography where absence becomes presence, and the body is evoked through technological residue rather than physical appearance. The dramaturgical act of removal recalls Jérôme Bel’s Shirtology (1997), where the seemingly simple act of undressing destabilises conventions of dance and representation. Similarly, NoCap undermines the expectation that motion capture must serve representation, instead foregrounding interaction, contingency, and the materiality of data itself. This exploration engages posthumanist and new materialist frameworks, particularly Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’, Jane Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’, Rosi Braidotti’s ‘assemblages’, and Timothy Morton’s ‘ecological thought’, which decentre the human subject and acknowledge the entanglement of body, machine, and code. Within the wider ecology of a performative installation project, including artworks made of soil, sound, biosensing, fungi, and reflective structures, NoCap highlights how digital technologies can be reimagined when artistic practice resists normative uses. Drawing on Lisa Woynarski’s bioperformativity, we propose that such experiments invite alternative dialogues between body, space, and technology where more-than-human agencies co-constitute performance.