In a society that is becoming increasingly obsessed with the digital, I am interested as a choreographer in exploring our relationship to these developments and what this means for the individual. Coming from a researched background of exploring authorship and documentation, I am fascinated by the possibility that the online world creates for sharing information which is constantly moving, transforming, flowing and exposing, but also the capacity for permeance and the dangers of this. As each day we are asked to input more and more information about ourselves online, the online becomes an expanding platform for not only communication and knowledge, but an extension of the self.

Inspired by a Ted Talk of the same name by academic Juan Enruquez which I came across when researching documentation, ‘Digital Tattoo’ looks at the exposing nature of the online, but also the permeance of this data, which is most likely to outlive the flesh, symbolically shown through film projection onto the body. Relevant to recent debates about the right to be forgotten, ‘Digital Tattoo’, hopes to remind its audience of the permanence and uncontrollable nature of the online and to encourage them to think more before sharing/posting/uploading.

As a choreographer I am also interested in the people I work with and that is why I am often seen working with different dancers each time and both those trained in dance and those not from dance backgrounds. For this work, I am working with two trained dancers who are able to respond quickly to choreographic tasks and are open to play. This was integral for the research and development of the work, which involved both learning set choreographed movement, but also a lot of task based work, drawing either directly from their real online profiles or from feelings, facts or stories, such as the greek myth Narcissus. They also needed to have a strong connection to each other to convey communications and interactions.

What has been a really exciting element during the development of this work has been the opportunity for artistic development through integrating new technologies into my work and working with digital mentor Nic Sandiland and dramaturge Lou Cope, creating new choreographic challenges, questions and possibilities.