Huang Yi & KUKA comes to Big Sky

WARREN MILLER PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

Award-winning international performance sensation Huang Yi & KUKA is coming to the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky on Tuesday, Oct. 29.

“This is a once in a decade opportunity,” said John Zirkle, WMPAC’s executive director. “I’ve been hoping to present them for years now. This group rarely tours in the United States, so we leapt at the opportunity to have them on our stage.”

Huang Yi & KUKA reveals humanity through a series of vignettes between live dancers and KUKA, a robotic machine conceptualized and programmed by acclaimed Taiwanese choreographer and dancer Huang Yi. The performance harmoniously weaves together the art of dance and the science of mechanical engineering to push artistic boundaries.

KUKA is a German brand of highly specialized industrial robots often used in manufacturing settings, including in American automotive plants like Ford and GM. The machine looks nothing like the stereotypical humanoid robots of the Jetsons, but through a painstaking choreography process, the machine assumes the grace of human movement and interaction, as if it is responding to and even emoting alongside the dancers. Each minute of choreography requires ten to twenty hours of programming.

“Dancing face to face with a robot is like looking at my own face in a mirror… I think I have found the key to spin human emotions into robots,” Huang has said.

The show is family-friendly, and unlike any classical dance performance the audience has ever seen. While witnessing the movement is beautiful, the performance more so evokes questions about the realm of artificial intelligence, and how new technologies might change the traditional boundaries between ourselves and the machines we create.

“So many of us have questions about how humans and computers will interact in the future, and usually those questions don’t move past intellectual hypotheticals,” said Zirkle. “Huang Yi & KUKA is a visual, visceral representation of what that relationship can actually look like.”

“WMPAC is thrilled to always be pushing the edges of adventure in the performing arts, and Huang Yi & KUKA are emblematic of that mentality,” Zirkle went on.

Huang Yi and KUKA are joined on stage by (human) dancers Hu Chien, Hsieh Cheng-Yu, Chen Chao-Li, and Chen Yi-Chen.

The hour-long performance is at 7pm on Tuesday, October 29 at WMPAC. Tickets and more information are available at warrenmillerpac.org