CHARCO (Spanish for ‘puddle’) is a sound, video, and performance installation where the body serves as a technology—rediscovering its somatic capacities and offering new pathways to being alive and caring for our environment. Drawing from feminist science fiction, the work is set in an imagined future where a group of humans have never experienced nature, and therefore perceive the sensorial world in fundamentally different ways. It foregrounds the importance of bodily experience, awakening ancestral memories and reimagining what it once meant to be human. The choreographic scores explore bodies as porous, networked beings—forming collaborative techno-organisms and temporary micro-ecologies within a wider landscape of data saturation and ecological collapse. Choreography here becomes a medium to surface evolutionary patterning within and between bodies, in dialogue with artificial technologies. The performers navigate scores that center on streams of sensory data, processes of fleshy information, and the exchange of affect and impact between themselves and the installation.

The work’s responsive technology element was developed during a residency at De Montfort University in collaboration with creative technologist Craig Appleby. Technology in CHARCO is not a tool but a collaborator—a portal through which the audience can witness the performer’s consciousness and attempts to remember nature within a transformed world. Video footage of natural landscapes and collective human-machine interactions was projected in puddle-like forms on the floor, activated through kinetic technology. These video ‘puddles’ responded to the performers’ articulations of memory via sound, touch, laughter, and spatial dynamics. This created a cybernetic relationship—an exchange where both performer and technology informed and transformed one another, becoming part of the choreographic process. At its core, CHARCO is also about the body as technology. The somatic devices we carry—the ear, the mouth, the eyes, the skin—do not operate in isolation, but are activated through relational entanglements with human and more-than-human interfaces. The piece explores the indivisibility of the organic and artificial, positioning the dancing body as a cyborg body, offering its own technologies of perception, sensation, and imagination. Audiences are invited into a diffracted screen time, a pooling of corporeality, and a collective dreaming space.

At its core, CHARCO is also about the body as technology. The somatic devices we carry—the ear, the mouth, the eyes, the skin—do not operate in isolation, but are activated through relational entanglements with human and more-than-human interfaces. The piece explores the indivisibility of the organic and artificial, positioning the dancing body as a cyborg body, offering its own technologies of perception, sensation, and imagination. Audiences are invited into a diffracted screen time, a pooling of corporeality, and a collective dreaming space. CHARCO is an episode within the larger interdisciplinary research project, The Machine of Horizontal Dreams (2023–25) which interrogates and reimagines ideas of progress. A new iteration of CHARCO premiered at The Dance Space, South East Dance, Brighton, in October 2023.