#1814: 「Sunset Motel」— Thomas Ottの画風とシュールな舞踊が出会うVR体験

The Voices of VR Podcast. a really innovative dance piece that actually has some really amazing art style by Thomas Orte. So I had a chance to sit down and talk with Gilles Jaban. In fact, the three previous episodes or three previously unpublished interviews about projects from Gilles Jaban that I wanted to also get out as a part of this conversation. But this piece has a lot of really interesting, like, interpretive dance, and so I classified it as Air Earth, the air being that there's a lot of communication that's happening within the context of you walking around, this kind of relational dynamics of these people as they're related to each other.

You're at this hotel, and there's some mysterious kind of like Twin Peaks-esque mystery things that are happening that you sort of see this culmination at the end where you're like, what is even happening here? So there's kind of like an experimental and weird vibe to the whole thing, but you're also trying to puzzle together like what's happening. But it's also the way that each of the dancers are moving relative to each other. You're able to kind of see this kind of interpretive dance and communication. So you're kind of understanding who's who, how are they related to each other. You actually have a chance to kind of move your body through space. And so that's the other kind of earth element is that it's a very spatial context. You're at this hotel. You're kind of exploring around this hotel. And you actually have kind of more of the fire element agency to move around and see what perspective you want to watch and observe this action as it's unfolding. And it was more teleporting. So you're kind of teleporting around, which to me sometimes is more comfortable from a VR perspective, but also can kind of break the spatial continuity. And so there's these different disjunctive breaks that then ends up being a little bit more abstracted as well, leaning more into like the air element aspect.

But overall, I think this kind of fusion of the dance with this really incredible art style that they're able to recreate within the context of VR that Gilles will go into great detail about collaborating with Thomas Ort to bring his very unique art style into this piece. So really incredible art direction. And also just to see the power of using something like dance and choreography in the context of some of these immersive stories. So, we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So, this interview with Jules happened on Monday, September 7th, 2026, at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. So, I'm Gilles Jobin. I'm a choreographer. I've been into VR since around 2017. 16, actually, when I discovered motion capture, which for me as a choreographer was just a massive discovery of the possibility of capturing movement and entering the digital world, like somehow to be inside the computer, which is like a fantasy, especially when it comes from my generation,

that we saw movies like Tron and all. To me, this was science fiction. And then when I could see myself captured and projected on the screen in real time, I thought, oh, there's really something about those new digital territories that I think is interesting to explore. Nice. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Yeah, so I'm a choreographer. I started about, I think my first piece was like in 95, 96. 97 was my first group piece. So I've been doing like contemporary dance creations for the stage for about probably 20 or so years until I got to start to be interested in the volume, first starting with the movie, with the 3D movie. I did a 3D movie called Womp. And actually is when I saw the movie Pina by Jim Benders, which is here at the festival at the moment, in 3D. And I thought, oh, this is like the language. That's something I can understand as a choreographer.

So that's when I started to feel that there was another space that was available. You know, when you think about it, in the 50s and the 60s, 60s, you know, dancers started to dance in New York on the roof or in the park or in the street or in the museum. And people were like, oh, this is not dance because, you know, it's not in the theater. But actually they were exploring new territories for dance. And now it's totally common and accepted. So I think what happened with the digital is the same. So it's like it's opening a door of a world that was there, always been there. It existed, the virtual world. But now we have the means and the power, the computing power to render in real time and to enter into those worlds. So I did the piece, my first proper VR piece was VRI in 2018. That was here at Venice and also at Sundance. I think that's where we met in 2018. That was a piece with five people, location-based piece, five people at the same time wearing a backpack, VR headset, and they could see themselves as avatars. And they were immersed in a world of big giant dancers

and with a lot of space around them, they could really move and play around. It was a very playful piece and that got quite a lot of success. And we toured a lot with the piece around the world for quite many years. Unfortunately, the piece got cut because I had a collaboration with a tech company and they cut out the license after three years because they made business with this license. So I was cut off. So I had to stop touring the piece even though the piece was still with a lot of possibilities. Then COVID came. That killed the piece twice. So I thought, okay, well, now maybe it's time to change course and start to produce my own content in my own studio. So I started to acquire equipment, motion capture equipment. Now my studio in Geneva is equipped with 42 optical cameras. So I have a very high-end motion capture system. And we started really to understand what is to produce in-house. now I have a developer working full-time in the company

which is probably one of the few dance companies that have a developer working full-time and then we continue to make pieces I did a piece at Sundance that was called DanceRaid which is still available on the App Store actually it's an AR app where you can place dancers in the world and make videos and it's just a fun little app but then that was just before COVID actually when I was at Sundance that's when COVID started to really happen around the world, especially in Asia and China. I was like, oh, this is not going well. And when I came back to Switzerland, I was working on a stage piece with motion capture. And we got the news that I was like, oh, we're never going to make it. One month and a half before the premiere, the world just stopped. So I took a kind of a radical decision at the time. You know, like most of my colleagues in the performing arts were like postponing and postponing and postponing. And I thought, hmm, this is not a postponing thing. It's like a cancelling thing. So I decided to cancel the creation. I paid everybody up to the end. So for them, it was the same. They went back home.

The composer was in New York. I think he jumped on the last flight to New York, actually. I would have stuck for months in Geneva. So it was a bit of a panicky moment, but I decided to go full digital. So I thought, okay, I had already some equipment. So I thought, maybe now is the time to really investigate the space and start performing at a distance. So that's what we did. we did the first experiment with some colleagues in Argentina from Geneva we worked together inside the Unity space we were being motion capture under my studio in Geneva they were using Kinect so that was much more rudimentary but they managed and that was like a great discovery also to say wow, we can be together in the same virtual space even though we are totally thousands of kilometers away from each other so that was like kind of a triggering moment for us to say, oh, that's feasible, and it's not only feasible, but robust enough to present it to an audience, to say, yes, at that time, on that day, we would do a presentation, and it would not crash, like, every five minutes.

So it was pretty stable, relatively simple to set up. So I decided to make a piece, like a proper piece, which was La Comédie Virtuelle live show, because at the time, I did the model of a theater in Geneva that was under construction, so the idea was to make the theatre and then so people could visit the theatre before it's finished and kind of have a feel of what it was and that was also before COVID but when COVID came everything was, you know, late the work of the theatre was late but we had the virtual theatre so I thought, oh, we have a virtual theatre I have a system to perform at a distance why don't we make a piece in that theatre which was my plan all the way but the plan was to do like maybe in four years or three years I thought, you know, I thought the world was not ready to connect, you know, from anywhere to come to a live performance so I thought, you know, it's a good idea but maybe for later. But when COVID came, I thought that's the idea for today, you know. So we produced this piece, and instead of making it simple, I'm a little bit complicated because I had one dancer that was stuck in Melbourne, in Australia, another one was stuck in Bangalore, in India.

So we sent them some motion capture suits, and we were performing with three dancers from my studio. And this was, like, all so quick. I think we started probably, like, in April or something like that, And I think in May we showed, no, June, I think we showed the demo of the system to Liz and Michelle from Venice. And they said, oh, this is amazing because this year will be fully digital, so let's do it. But I had no content at all. I just had something that was working. I had a theater. I had the system that was working, but I had no content. So we had to create this content. And I think we worked for about a month or so, or probably more, like five or six weeks, you know, rehearsing with someone in Australia, There's someone in Switzerland and so on in Bangalore. The poor girl, Dia in Bangalore, was mostly in the middle of the night because we were in the morning, evening in Australia and Switzerland, but for her, for some reason, was always very late. But anyway, we managed to pull out. I think a piece that was kind of okay, and we could welcome a live audience either in VR, on a PC computer, on a Mac computer,

so they could move in a video game or be in VR. and sometime we had like 13, 14 different nationalities coming together to watch the show. Not a lot of audience, like maybe 30. We thought we were going to have more, but onboarding at a distance, it was crazy time. People would forget and it was difficult to board the piece, but nevertheless, it worked. Then I finished the piece because we did it so quickly. I thought it was a little bit like we could do more, so we did the second part of the piece. but then I thought ah this is so much effort it's so complicated to create and to get the people together and for people to connect and I thought I need something that is easier to access so I thought why don't we do a 2D screening so that went up with the piece Cosmogony and Cosmogony is a piece that we performed from my studio we're still doing it we did the premiere was in 2021 in Singapore again a COVID story because it was supposed to be a projection on a building and when COVID came in Singapore they didn't have COVID for quite a long time, but then suddenly,

like just before our premiere, they had COVID. They said, oh no, we cannot gather people like outdoor in front of this building. It was like, oh, this is crazy. And they said, oh, but maybe we can put you in a theater. So finally they put it inside a huge massive 3000 theater but with only 50 people inside Which was like oh no You know I thought it was going to be cancer So I was happy So we could do it We could perform it And that gave us, like, also the idea to make it a bit more simple and really use a 16-9 format, just a screen, because it was a three-screen type of, I mean, we had three different screens because the building was very wide. So we made a 16-9 version of it. And it became quite easy to do, because the system, I had three dancers, so only dancers in my studio, no other dancers across the world. Three dancers in my studio with advanced motion capture system, so with a lot of movement capability, three dancers. And the way it works is online gaming. So, like, the venue will have a PC computer, gaming computer.

We will send them a build, like, the program if you want, and then they will connect to a server only to grab the motion capture data. So it was quite light to run, just need like a stable internet connection, a screen. And of course we'd rehearse a little bit before, do some instruction, instruct them how to do it. But it worked quite well. And also it was, it is, but we're still doing the piece, cheap. Because that was always my worry. Even VRI in 2018, we were doing 100 people per day. And 107 hours. So 100 people per day is like an okay number for a mid-sized dance performance. So meaning that we're traveling three or four people. So the cost of the performance was kind of okay, you know, equivalent to a dance piece. Same for Cosmogony. Cosmogony is even cheaper because, you know, if I have to come to New York, for instance, it's going to take me at least a week, five or six days, you know, traveling, setting up, performing, going back. Cosmogony is one day. We just organized a bit before. People come to the studio.

We do the performance and we go back home. So we could bring down the cost. The cost is around €3,000 for one performance. No travel, no hotel, no period I am, no nothing. They don't even have to meet us. And we did that at Sundance. Sundance was a little bit special because it was also a digital edition, so it was inside this virtual theater. That was also quite interesting to do. And then the piece started to be quite successful. And we did a lot of performances, and I thought after COVID it was going to stop. But then now it continued to work. So, so far, we did more than 30 cities in the world. I estimate about 250,000 kilometers that we did not travel, which is a high equivalent in carbon emission that we didn't spend. So, it became this kind of tour-without-traveling kind of idea. And since 2020, we haven't taken the plane to travel without work. So, that was a big change of not only in terms of what we spend in terms of plane traveling, But just my lifestyle totally changed because I was always traveling, always touring my pieces.

So suddenly I was touring as much as before but without traveling. And one performance would take only me one day. Like even I couldn't perform in Asia, which is very practical because it's like around 11 or 12 in the morning. I'm back in the office in the afternoon or in the studio. A little bit more difficult in Los Angeles, 4 o'clock in the morning. That was a tough one. So we did the Music Center in Los Angeles, St. Francis Codan's Film Festival, a festival in Miami, Film Gate Miami. So many places, dance venues, film festivals, tech kind of context, programs. So it was quite revolutionary, really. Be a dance company that tours internationally but does not travel. And, you know, it was a big change. and in terms of my funding bodies in Switzerland, and they kind of very well accepted this kind of new concept. And then they just let me do this. And then we continued. We just continued to make work. I did an installation, a location of installation in augmented reality called Magic Window.

And, you know, the studio got every time more equipped. I started to apply for funding for residency. So now we work with artists in residence, such as Claudius Van Essex. She just won yesterday. I'm so happy. She won the College Biennale Blend Award. That's amazing for her. And she will come in January again to the studio. So by inviting artists in the studio, we started to learn from them, and we could break what I call the bottleneck of motion capture. So that was nurturing my own creation. Here in Venice, we come with two projects. One is Sunset Motel, which is a collaboration with an illustrator, Thomas Ott. He's a famous scratch artist. so it's a piece that is quite fun and it was very complex the most complex piece I've ever done nine characters just in one go and then we have a piece which is about Martha Beckett an American choreographer that decided to live in the middle of the desert in Death Valley Junction and she was a painter so she painted all her theatre by hand so we scanned the theatre

and we put her back on stage so just to say that that's my trajectory because one thing led to another and now I'm like fully immersed into this digital world. It's been 10 years now that I'm doing motion capture. So we realized that we were quite good at motion capturing, not only on the technical side, but also to making the most out of the movement and work with quality movement with dancers. Awesome. Yeah, thanks for that recap of your journey into the space. And so here you're premiering Sunset Motel. So for people who haven't seen it, how would you describe what is this experience? What were you trying to either show a story or show an experience with Sunset Motel? Well, Sunset Motel is, as I said, a collaboration with Thomas Ott. And Thomas Ott is a very particular artist. He works with a scratch board. Scratch board is like a black sheet and they scratch manually. And instead of drawing, he's taking out the matter out of the board and then revealing the white that is underneath. So it's a very detailed and very fine technique

and very difficult, actually, and very precise. And his world is kind of dark humor, kind of rock, low-life characters, very expressive character. He's like a cartoon artist. So he makes stories, stories that are without words, very expressive, very simple, always. Those characters, there's always something that happens to them, very dramatic, and also a little bit funny, and kind of the absurdity of life. so I met him because he made the music for Cosmogony he's also a singer in a band a very good friend of mine so they made the music for Cosmogony and that's how I met him and we were like oh Thomas what about have you ever thought about doing 3D and he was like no I don't like animation because frame by frame you know with my scratch technique it's smooth and I don't like that so we said no no no but we have a totally different approach because we had to find a way to make his world work in 3D so because he's scratching like, you know, if he's trashing the face, he's going to scratch more on the right side

where the light is coming from and less on the other side. But if the head turns around, then how are you going to deal with that? So our 3D artist, Tristan, he found a way to use the RGB channel, I think it's in Unity, and so to make it appear what is more... So Thomas will scratch a little bit, scratch a little bit more, and scratch a lot. So wherever the light is, that's what will appear. So we did a lot of research and development for this. Thomas was like super enthusiastic about that And we said, okay, let's do it So let's go for it So we started to look for funding We started in 2022 So it took us about four years To get everything together And that's when it started to become a bit more difficult Because that was about the story So he has stories that are Even though they are without work They're very narrative So he was writing stories And we were trying to make them happen In the studio with the dancers And it was like sometimes Was not so convincing Too much detail Too complicated and even himself he realized that it was just not working. And he said, yeah, but what is really nice, what really works is when you move.

And I was like, yes, that's the thing. So we realized that we had to give more space to movement. You know, a choreographer creates meaning with movement. So it's not narrative, but it creates meaning. So I thought, okay, so let's try to be more movement-based. Because my main issue, we quickly decided that, so it's a motel, right? So it's a culture cell motel. so you arrive to this motel and there's this guy from the motel his name is Gasman he welcomes you and he doesn't see you so he's just there waiting and you get in and then you just enter this motel and you're free to go wherever you want at first we think okay you get to the motel and to the lobby and the guy gives you a key and you get the key and you go to the room and you open the room and you open the door you know this kind of typical interactive scene by scene type of stuff and I was like nah I was not convinced about that I thought this is too obvious and too boring and we have to do something that's more challenging So I thought people need to be free. So they were like some kind of invisible guest of this motel. They arrived. You know, nobody sees them. There's a lot of characters in the motel where they can go wherever they want.

So the difficulty was how do you tell a story, like a Thomas Hobbes story, which, you know, if there is like, you know, a murder, then he will maybe draw a gun on the table or a Bible on the table or, you know, you like small detail in a frame. So even though he doesn't use words, but just the fact that you see the gun, you understand that there will be a murder or something violent happening. But we couldn't do that because people might be on the other side of the motel. So I had to find situations that were understandable from any place that you are, and also that people could follow the story or follow, you know, the thing unfolding. So that's why we have, like, dancing scenes. So there's this woman, and she comes into a room, and she kind of flirt with this guy, and she starts dancing with him, and then her sister comes, and she's a bit jealous, and she wrote the radio and she goes back to her room and then the sister follows in the room and the guy's like following, like, oh, where are you going? And then the two sisters start to fight a little bit and then they just pop out into the patio and then the people in front hear the noise and see if something happened and they come out and they see what's going on.

So, like, the story's unfolding by event by event, like, attract, the agitation attracts. But the whole situation that are like, you can see them, like, arguing and fighting and then you can go to the pool and come back and they're still arguing and fighting. So that was the difficulty, was to kind of co-write the story. So I think it's more of an adaptation of his stories. So he gave us like big lines and also he gave us, I think that was very important, the backstories of the characters. So all those characters have a very strong backstory. You know, one is a vet from a war, maybe Vietnam War, we don't know, but he's a vet from a war, he has no leg. Another one, there's two sisters, They're twin sisters. So all have their backstories. And again, we thought, okay, so should we, they're very nice. So I thought, they really defend the characters. And I thought, oh, maybe we should tell people, you know, like, put them, oh, that's the backstories. And then we realized, no, because when you go to those dodgy motels, you don't know the backstories of the people. They just look strange.

They're weird. You start imagining who they are, what is their stories. So eventually that was the idea, to create this kind of strange world. and so you're immersed in this world of Thomas Hurt, full of phony characters, low-life characters. You don't know exactly what they are doing here, why they are here, why are you here. It's like, probably you arrive too early, maybe you arrive too early and there no room for you there no vacancy and you see those people And then there one moment that toward the end that they all come out and they start dancing And then that's when you understand that why they're here. Because there's the caretaker that comes. He starts playing the ukulele and they all start flying off. So is this the empty chamber of death? Are they being abducted by something? And why are you left alone with the caretaker? so we managed to kind of make a story that is understandable but still open to interpretation which is quite typical of contemporary dance so I think that's what I'm happy about is that I think we managed to

lead the audience in a very natural way into what's going on and really being immersed in this really amazing world of Tomás I'm a big fan of him Guillermo del Toro is a fan of his work He asked him to do a cover for one of the re-editions of a DVD. So, you know, he has this very identifiable, I mean, if you check him out on the Internet, you will find some Thomas. It's very specific. If you've seen it once, you don't forget. So that was the big challenge. And I think I'm happy because I think we did it. Yeah, and I really enjoyed how I was able to be led through the piece, where it's a pretty big hotel, but there's not a lot that's going on during the far end, and so you're kind of slowly led from character to character, and you're really watching the interaction of the characters. And I really enjoyed seeing the relationships between the characters. You get a lot of texture in terms of just the body language and how they're moving around each other. And, yeah, it culminates into this really magical realism type of, what I was thinking was, like, you're able to do the type of choreography

where you're flowing, like, fighting zero gravity, flying through the air, which is, like, beyond what you can normally do with choreography, unless you have, like, lots of wires and other expensive equipment or special effects. But, yeah, I just also really love the fluidity with how the characters, you could really feel the humanness in them based upon, because they're being motion captured by dancers, that it just gives them a lot of life and very convincing, even though the visual aesthetic is that it's clearly a stylized depiction where it puts you into this, okay, I'm in this animation world, but yet you see so much, like, human qualities be emanated through the movements, which I thought was really quite an interesting juxtaposition of those two things. And I guess a technical question is, since you're doing motion capture, were you doing this in a big, giant open space with everyone together, or did you have to do things, like, individually? Because there's so many interactions in this piece, and I'm just curious if you were, like, having a smaller space and then having people interact and then kind of stitching it all together, or if you were able to get, like, a pretty large capture volume

that you were able to have everybody in the same space kind of dancing together and, like, be able to do it, like, in one take. So just curious to hear the logistics of how you actually captured it. Well, I wish I had a giant studio. My studio is not that big. The mo-cap space is about 10 by 10 meters by 6 meters. So, yeah, that was the big challenge, was to create interaction between the characters. So, well, obviously, when there's a couple dancing, they dance together. So we had to find a way to keep them together in a small space and then stitch the different scene together, but we're keeping the interaction. So that was the big work. And this is, I think, really the work that did Susana Panales-Diaz, my partner. And she's one of the performers. But she's also what we call a movement coordinator. So she really kind of organized the shooting and also think about how it's going to be integrated in Unity. And she was in charge of doing the integration in Unity so she can physically do it herself, which is amazing to have a performer that can perform on the MugCup studio

and then work on the Unity project and lead the integration. So we had really to organize when you go out of the mock-up space and you enter the next mock-up space. So that was the big challenge, really, of the piece because there's so much interaction and so much, I think, happening at the same time. So when they're all together in the patio dancing, then we have different what we call mock-up space that we place inside the motel. So like one mock-up space, I mean, my studio could do one room a little bit of outside of the room. So that's how we managed. That was the most complicated thing. It would have been much easier with the big studio. I mean, that's what I had. I mean, it was comfortable to work. You know, it's my home studio. That's where we work every day. So we know it. And I mean, it was quite complicated. And also, you know, you mentioned the life inside the characters. Some characters, you know, one can be like very big, another is very skinny or like tall. So there's a lot of embodiment also that, what we call the embodiment, which is to kind of understand how the avatar moves

and, you know, the dancer has to move, but how does the dancer animate the avatar like a top tier somehow? And you cannot overact. If you overact, then you see that it's overacting, so you have to stay very natural. So we really concentrate on the quality of movement and also that the bow cap is as, you know, pure and good quality as possible, the less of that acting as possible as well. So there was a lot of technical thing, but trying not because of the tech and the stitching of the scene together, but making it something very robotic and with like a lot of reanimation, you know, after. So there's not so much reanimation. But, you know, it was difficult because Qualisys is the company we work with that we have the mocap system. They were developing some new, what they call special skeleton and all this like during the process. So, yeah, motion capture is a difficult, difficult thing, especially with objects. I think we still have a little bit of work to do on objects, so there will be a V2 where we will correct a few things that we are still unhappy with.

But, yeah, it was difficult to stitch all the pieces together. Yeah, I know it's not always easy to take the ending of one movement and integrate it into the beginning of another one. So it was all seamless. I couldn't tell. That's why I was asking if you were able to do it all in one take, but obviously not. So the other thing is that this piece reminds me a lot of like a sleep no more type of like you're moving through a space watching people do this kind of interpretive dance. And with sleep no more, obviously you're walking through the space, but also it's much more nonlinear. This was a much more linear path that you're taking on. But also you had the choice to do virtual locomotion, which meant that you're kind of teleporting as a ghost. And so you have the ability to jump around. And I found myself actually taking my hand at some point and pointing it behind me and clicking so that I could just kind of back up because I could keep watching without having to, like, turn around and, like, rotate around and everything. And so I found that I was getting a little bit more sophisticated as time went on, which was to find a spot in the room that's going to be the best view for whatever's unfolding.

Or if I want to be outside and still have an eye on what's happening on this room, but also have other things that are developing, you kind of have lots of different multi-threaded narratives that are evolving where there's lots to look at. And there's lots of choices you can make in terms of where I'm at to see them. But that was an interesting choice in terms of, like, I'm a ghost. I'm not really a character. I'm also able to blip around in this teleport mechanic, which normally I like free locomotion. It can make people motion sick, but that's usually for if I want to preserve the integrity of the world that I'm seeing. Like, this is less about the world, and this is more about the characters, and I'm paying more attention to the characters. And so I'm trying to find what's the best spot for me to see these two characters interacting. And because they're moving around a lot, I'm having to make a lot of choices as to where I should move to see the action that's unfolding. And so that's kind of the character of the experience I found was a lot of moving around just to kind of see the relational dynamics of who these people are, how they're relating to. This seems to be culminating into something that has a pretty epic culmination there at the end.

So, yeah, just curious if you have any comments on allowing people the freedom to kind of wander and move around and choose where they want to be to be able to see action as it is unfolding. Yes, well, that was the big question. you know obviously it's tempting to have a space big enough where you can move really like walk but you know i would have to have the size of a motor so that was just invisible and also you know for once and i did a lot of installation location based pieces live performing pieces i want to have something that was simple just into a quest 3 you know one single headset very simple motion single user no multi-user you know like really the basic so i mean for me the position of the spectator or the participant in the project is so important in VR. And I see so many pieces where I think this is not properly solved. And that's what makes me feel sometimes uncomfortable in the piece. The piece might be nice, but like my position, I don't know why I'm doing here. The locomotion is strange. So I thought, you know, I want people to be able to choose what they want to see.

If they want to move a lot. Some people are very active. Some people are less active. You can see it from a different point of view. And also, you know, it's a piece that is thought for, you know, potentially distribution. So, you know, you might own your own headset and have it on your headset. You might want to do it more than once. So if you do it more than once, I mean, it's impossible here in Venice to do it twice because it's so crowded. But theoretically, it is. So if you do it again, then maybe you're going to choose like a totally different path. You're going to say, oh, this time I'm going to sit from really far or I'm going to stay all the time in the patio. Or on the contrary, I'm going to go like really close to the action because maybe I was a little bit afraid to be crossed by the character. And the question of the invisibility is, I think it's part of the narrative, because somehow, I mean, it was a question, because, you know, like, you know, some people say, oh, you know, we can have this system that you get into the room and all the characters look at you or stuff like that. And I thought, I think it has to be clear that you're invisible. You're there, but they don't pay any attention to you. You're like, you know, fly on the wall.

You're walking around. You're like, why are they not looking at me? You know, there's no interaction with me. You know, bear in mind that their faces are like scratched and there's no eye movement, there's no animation on the face, so, which they have this strange gaze, you know, also. So, yeah, I thought the invisibility was the best way to be in this place, like, see what you're not supposed to see, you know, which is part of the story because, like, that's why the story I tell to myself is like, you know, well, you know, I arrived too early. I'm the next one. I'm the next batch of abducted people. so I just arrived too early, there's no room for me so I have to hang out in the pool, I have to wait for my turn to come and at the end when they all fly off, I'm staying alone there's the gas man, he goes back in front of the motor and waits for the next client and I'm the first one and they will be coming with the bus that came at the beginning so when you arrive you land on the bus stop so you could imagine that, oh okay, I took the wrong bus so I arrived too early and then little by little

the next batch will come and then maybe I will start to see myself or something like that, you know. So being a choreographer, I like to leave, you know, the meaning up to the spectators, you know. I want to be suggestive, but I don't want to tell you, oh, this is the story, it's not a narrative story, so I leave like, so this is one of my most narrative work, but, you know, I don't tell you exactly what is the situation. So some people have different interpretation of the end, for instance, different interpretation of what is this place, and I'm happy with that. And I think it makes it maybe a little bit stronger because when you think for yourself then it lacks a stronger meaning You know like they say and you look at this guy and say oh this is strange this she must be you know whatever And then you imagine their story You kind of make a fantasy story of who they are and where they come from, which is a very natural thing to do. We do this all the time in real life. Say like you were here on this island, this dear island, and I was talking with this English participant

and it was her first time and she doesn't know so many people. and then her producer left and she was left a bit alone on the island. She didn't know so many people. And she's kind of like, yeah, it's cool, all those cool people, but I don't know them yet. You know, it's like that's what happened in life, you know. And then little by little you start to know them and then you start to relate and maybe you start talking to one that leads to another one and then, you know, then you're part of the family, you know. So for me it was, I don't like when people are like, oh, what I'm doing here or why this or why that, but it's hard to think questions that take them out of the story. So I was trying to make something that you get into the story and after you go, oh, what the fuck? What's that? Something like that. Yeah, there's other pieces that are sort of like that spatial world, but there's a lot of room for your own interpretation. I sort of refer to it as like a symbolic dream logic where you're kind of thrown into place. You feel like you're in a bit of a waking dream. You don't quite know. It's a little bit confusing. It's unpredictable. It's surprising and novel and interesting.

but you're able to project your own meaning onto whatever things are happening. And I feel like that your piece, Yes, They May Be, Honey Boys, there's a number of pieces like that where it feels like you're kind of, like, taken through a bit of a dream. I wanted to ask what it was like for you to do choreography in zero gravity. Did you actually have, like, wires on yourself, like, moving around? Or, like, how did you actually, like, capture the zero gravity choreography? Well, we just, we're dancers, so we find ways. So just like standing one leg and like having a floaty movement and then changing leg very slowly. And then they are animated. So because they start, they go like, they move, twist and change direction. So it's the animation that makes them feel weightless. But actually they do it on the floor. But I've done it also in Cosmogo and in many different pieces. People laugh. It's funny because this is choreographer. She does zero gravity dance pieces, like, you know, those parabolic flight. and I was like, I don't need to do I can just do it in my studio

with motion capture we try to find very simple ways to do things and I think that's the thing, the dancers they're natural for motion capture I found out that most of the action actors that you see in the movies they're dancers maybe they do stunt, maybe they do fighting skills, they learn new skills but where they come from is dance or martial arts which also is very choreographed so the dancers have really an understanding of space and also they have an understanding of finding solutions, special solutions in movement or movement in space. So you give them instruction, you explain to them what it's about and they very quickly understand and then they can put their own understanding of it and they become creative. So they augment your proposition with their talent. So that's why I always recommend people to work with dancers more than actors, you know, for most of the motion captures. Like when I say, oh, but I don't need the dancers, I said, yeah, but it's not the dancer. It's like someone that is really into movement, very precise into movement.

You know, a dancer, you ask them to make a choreography with three fingers, and they can make a choreography. So you feed them with instructions, like an instruction-based kind of way to work. I mean, I'm not like a choreographer. It's not a TikTok dance. It's like one, two, three, four, where you have synchronized. It's more like a game of sports or like football or soccer. You know, you tell the rule, okay, with the foot, gold is over there, gold is there. Don't touch with your hand. and you play and that's football but you can be like super expert in football like professional or you can just play football in the yard but you explain the rules and the motion start by itself it generates by itself so that's typically the kind of thing that we do with the flying scene is like we explain we do some try out you know the thing having my own motion capture studio i can take time to try and test and do it and then we show it to them and then they see and they can really understand what's going on and that was my frustration before i had my own mocap studio actually is that you know it's done it's finished it's very expensive and that's it and that's that's you get the thing and you can go back to it which is counterintuitive because that's the beauty of

motion capture and the virtual that you can always come back to it that's why i feel so natural in the virtual world because it's very similar to the performing art it's funny because we do cosmogonism sometimes people ask us why is it light why is this not a movie and i'm like well But first, people know this is live. So they're not stupid. It's a concept. The conceptually, they know that they are in L.A. and we are in Geneva. So they know and they see because they see a video image of us. Why is it live? Because I can change the piece. So Cosmogony is different. The Cosmogony we did at the opening, the Cosmogony that is now. I change a little bit. Maybe take a little part. It's better. So like, you know, dance piece normally is the creation is one thing. And sometimes maybe one year later, you took out 20 minutes out of the piece. You think it's impossible to cut. But then after a while you go, nah, this scene is, you know, I don't need this scene, I don't need this scene. So that's keeping the liveness is also keeping the piece alive. And when we do recording, we try to use the same kind of system, like we do long scenes also, not like bits and pieces.

Like sometimes people, they come to the studio and they're like, oh, we're going to do a loop and we're going to do a loop. Like, why do you want to do a loop? How long is your scene? Five minutes. Well, let's record five minutes. Why do you want to do a 30 second loop and loop it? It's going to show there is a loop. you know, just do the full piece, the full sequence. So we have a lot of tips and tricks that we develop, and I think really we discover graphic mind. And now that we have so many artists coming as residents in the studio or mentoring people, we really try to feed them also with all those possibilities and say, you know, take your time. I mean, my objective with the Mocap Studio is to break this bottleneck of cost. I think Mocap is overpriced. it's unaccessible for indie artists so I think we need to give indie artists access and when we will give them more access to creative spaces there will be more quality content I'm sometimes appalled by the quality of motion capture I've seen many work that I see because they use cheap solutions because they just don't have the money and then

it shows so it's such a pity if they could have my equipment they would do something so much better but it's not only the equipment is also the knowledge and how to use it and how to direct. So that's why we have this kind of what we call movement coordinator, which Susanna does. It's like she really helps the director. You know, sometimes the director comes from animation or movie or maybe they're not choreographers. They don't know how to direct the dancer. So to do this translation between their idea, the dancers, and how the dancer will augment the initial proposition. Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive storytelling and immersive dance might be and what it might be able to enable? Well, it's hard to say because there's so many different aspects to it. You know, we come in here 10 years of Venice Immersive. We know, you know, the difficulty to show the pieces through the headset. You know, you have one headset every 25 minutes, you know, like not so many people a day.

How many people in 10 days will see Sunset Matter? you know? So there's a distribution problem. I think, for me, I believe that the screens, like all sorts of screens, 360 cinemas, domes, or LED screens, have more potential. Because the power of the virtual can express itself on screens. I love VR, and I think the immersive is amazing. I saw Empyreo FC with the Apple Vision Pro, and I was like, what is this? I mean, it was like, I felt the same when I first saw my first VR piece, which I was like, what is this? You know, it's so, the quality is so amazing. So there is, of course, this potential, but, you know, they need $40,000 of just headsets to do the piece, you know. So that's, it's difficult to show this piece to an audience. It's great, but, so I think screens have this very big potential. Live, not live, recorded, you know, interaction. And, you know, in the performing art, the world of performing art is changing.

We use tools like video game engines, which is totally new. I mean, like, especially in show business. Show business is the way to think. They just started to see the power of a game engine to create, like, a show, like a big stage concert. They use video game engines. And you can pilot light to a video game engine. You can use interactive spaces. And even in the cinema, you know, they use video game engines. So I think that's the future, is this interoperability. And how you put it out, then that depends. You know, LED screens are still very expensive, but they're getting cheaper. Video projector, when I started, they were, like, unaffordable. And now you can buy, like, very good quality video projector for not so expensive. So I see, like, it's expanding onto the stage, out of the stage, different type of access at a distance. I mean, it's a whole blend. And now we have AI that is coming into the game. You can create an avatar. You know, you make a photo, 2D photo, put it into a software,

and you have a 3D avatar rig that you can use like 15 minutes later. So all this is an ever-changing field, I think. Awesome. Well, Jill, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast to give a bit of an update on all your journeys into VR. I know I have some previous interviews and conversations, so I'm going to try to get out with this as well so people can go back and hear some of these stories and your evolution. And, yeah, it's just really great to hear all the things that you're doing with mocap and trying to make it more accessible for indie artists, but also, yeah, the kind of humanness that's able to be emanated from a piece like Sunset Motel to have this kind of weird, surreal, dream-like quality experience that was really weird and kind of surprising and enjoyable to kind of see it all come together with Thomas Orr. It's really interesting animation. It was really great to hear how you were able to pull that off as well. So, yeah, thanks again for joining me on the podcast to help break it all down. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy,

meaning I want to give away all this information for free, make it public accessible for not only you but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. You know, I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1,000 true fans. And if I have just $5 a month from that $1,000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So I really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.