Protozoa, a project by Soñal Sinor featured during Novembre Numérique 2022

To develop the Protozoa project, the Soñal Sinor company, consisting of Zoé Lou and Clémence Plenet, joined forces with the u2p050 creative studio. Together, they invited nearly twenty artists to work on the Protozoa project, which is at the intersection of dance, philosophy and technology. Various digital processes were applied to danced forms to create a set of six videos and performances that were presented for the first time at 6B, in Saint-Denis, during the Nuit Blanche. 

Protozoa is a collective choreography where humans and machines mingle. Fourteen dancers and musicians have produced dance pieces that present themselves as "research objects on the bio-machine body". The result is a form of experimentation in which algorithms and bodies influence each other, immortalised in six films that include practices as varied as krump, flamenco or contemporary dance. The project is also characterised by its modularity, since it involves both permanent members and occasional partners. 

Several specific processes were developed to create Protozoa, such as a "stethophone" composed of sensors that record sounds directly from the dancers' bodies: vibrations, cracks and heartbeats give rhythm to each musical and visual score. The dancers' clothes are also subjected to a green screen technique to insert animations managed by artificial intelligence, which thus reimagines the texture of their bodies, their movements and their metamorphoses. 

Among the artists invited to join this project at the crossroads of live performance and digital art are dancers with international profiles such as Ricardo Serrao Mendes, Sara Angelucci, Marina de Remedios and Elise Roou Mulunesh. Available as a video or performance, Protozoa was also an opportunity for many guest musicians to express their own vision, at the intersection of dancing bodies and machines. For Novembre Numérique 2022, piloted by the Institut français throughout the world, Protozoa is now touring several establishments in the French cultural network abroad.