A computer program can enable people with disabilities to 'dance' on screen, with health and
artistic benefits, writes Michael Seaver

'We're just going to try a little experiment," says a voice in a broad Nobber accent, the
speaker's head disappearing into a mass of cables coming out of the back of a computer.
Dancers are standing watching, hands on hips. Eventually they go back to rehearsing
moves. In another corner are three Americans, recently arrived in Ireland, who are editing
sounds and tweaking visuals on laptops. In the middle a lone figure hunched over another
laptop types instructions and glances up at the results on a video projection. I'm sitting in the
middle of this, watching the worlds of science and dance collide.

The location is MediaLab Europe, in what used to be the Guinness Hop Store in Dublin,
and the rehearsal is for Counterbalance, a dance project made up of able-bodied and disabled
dancers. They will perform tonight at the O'Reilly Hall in Dublin, at the opening of Shaping the
Future, the seventh conference of the Association for the Advancement of Assisted
Technology in Europe.

Counterbalance is just part of a performance that brings together projects in development at
MediaLab Europe, CAT Lab in New York and SMARTlab in London and applies them in a
performance context.

The "little experiment" has worked, and we can now see projections on two big screens.
Canadian Robert Burke boots up Still Life, a computer program he has developed at
MediaLab that tracks the motion of two orbs, which in reality are two oversized tennis balls.
The result is amazing. A camera is focused on one of the dancers holding the orbs; this
image is projected onto the screen, but there are also two shimmering lights that flit about it.
The dancer "catches" these with the two orbs, and her image freezes and dissolves into a
picture of a landscape, only to reappear when she moves again.

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