Digital Body: Mind, Tension, and Perception with Alexander Whitley
Join us for a fascinating conversation with choreographer Alexander Whitley about how movement shapes consciousness and how technology transforms our perception of the world and of ourselves. In this episode, Alexander shares his vision of the body as a site of knowing and self-making. He calls it “auto-fabrication”, meaning we are continually creating ourselves through moving, sensing, perceiving, a process, he asserts, where there is creativity.
As Artistic Director of the Alexander Whitley Dance Company, Alexander places live bodies in dialogue with digital systems, staging the tension between our physical, embodied existence and the disembodied way of experiencing the world that modern technologies introduce. He explores how our experience becomes fractured, distributed spatially and temporally, and how social media creates what he calls “jittery, schizoid intervals,” a constant interruption that breaks the flow of attention into fragmented, arrhythmic patterns.
In this episode, he walks us through his productions: Antibody, on the transhumanist desire to transcend the body; Overflow, on the emotional impact of social media; Future Rites, a VR reimagining of The Rite of Spring; and his new work Mirror, inspired by Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror, which asks how much we absorb from what technology reflects back to us. Alex invites us to question the narratives that frame technology as either savior or destroyer, setting us into the grey area, where the real inquiry is. Be prepared to sit with a striking profound reflection: What becomes of the sensitive attunement between humans when screens mediate our bonds? Alexander reminds us that the mind is embodied, shaped by movement, rhythm, and connection. And that dance may be one of our most powerful tools for sensing what it means to be human.
*About Alexander Whitley: Award-winning choreographer and Artistic Director of the Alexander Whitley Dance Company. Trained at the Royal Ballet School; former dancer with Birmingham Royal Ballet, Rambert, and Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance. Recognised at the Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards and Sky Arts South Bank Award.
He has lectured at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
LINKS & INFO
https://www.alexanderwhitley.com
Instagram: @whitleydanceco
MUSIC COPYRIGHTS AND CREDITS
Music from the score created for Alexander Whitley’s production Overflow by Rival Consoles LINK TO ALBUM,. Written, Performed and Produced by Rival Consoles. Published by Erased Tapes Music. © 2021 Erased Tapes Records Ltd.
Tracks from the Overflow Album you heard in this interview courtesy of Erased Tapes Records originally commissioned for Alexander Whitley’s Overflow production:
Flow State,
Pulses of Information,
Monster,
Overflow,
Tension in the Cloud,
Making Sense Of It All
These Tracks were written, Performed and Produced by Rival Consoles. Published by Erased Tapes Music. © 2021 Erased Tapes Records Ltd.
To listen to this album please use THIS LINK, which will allow you to access the whole album to buy or stream via their preferred DSP.
https://www.rivalconsoles.net/overflow
