Drones light up the stage as world-first dance, Lucie in the Sky, headlines Canberra festival Uncharted Territory 2023

Pixar is the king of making audiences empathise with inanimate objects on screen, whether it's a robot, a car, a toy or even a lamp. But when it comes to real life, how do you give something like a drone human characteristics?

That was the starting point for Lucie in the Sky, the upcoming dance performance from the Australasian Dance Collective and a highlight of the inaugural Uncharted Territory festival later this month.

Choreographer and Australasian Dance Collective artistic director Amy Hollingsworth was sitting in a London cinema watching a Pixar film when she started to consider how that same anthropomorphic experience could play out on stage. She was completely captivated not just by what she was seeing on screen, but by how the audience was deeply connected to these characters made out of inanimate objects.

"That triggered that first little spark in my brain of wondering, could we ever transcend that barrier between animation and real life?" she says.

"And could technology get to a point where we could craft and create a stage show where people had emotional responses to inanimate objects, just with the way that we choreograph and use them?"

It wasn't until a few years later when Hollingsworth came across Verity Studios and its trademarked mico drone design, known as Lucie, that the idea took flight.

Based in Zurich, Switzerland, Verity Studios specialises in combining technology with the arts, having already supplied drones for several Cirque du Soleil performances, as well as concerts for Metallica, Justin Beiber, Drake and Celine Dion.

Designed specifically for stage work, each Lucie micro drone weighs just 50 grams and is roughly the size of a sandwich. But being so small and lightweight, they're also safe for performers, such as the dancers in Lucie in the Sky, to interact with.

While these drones are not new to the stage, this is the first time the drones have been used as characters in a performance rather than simply as a type of light show or stage decoration.

"The [show] is performed by 11 characters, six of them happen to be human and five are teeny micro drones," Hollingsworth says.

"And each of them has really distinct characteristics. They have their own colours with their light source, they have their own temperament."

First up you have Lucie - the title role, who was also named after the Verity Studios' drone design. She is a shy and emotional drone, who loves to stay quite close to her human counterpart.

Then there is M, the drone leader who comes across as a calm and reassuring beacon of light. Red is a feisty and impassioned drone that at times is a bit tempestuous. Meanwhile, Skip is set to be the crowd favourite because of his joyful and cheeky approach to life. And on the other end of the spectrum is Rue, an ancient, sad drone, who carries the weight of all the knowledge the drones have about the world.

"I'm trying to do what Pixar did with Cars, Wall-E and Toy Story. But I'm trying to do that with drones in real life," Hollingsworth says.

It is all well and good to say that these are the attributes a drone will take on, but how do you do it practically?

Hollingsworth knew that in order to pull off an anthropomorphised inanimate object, she had to give them each distinctive movements.

"I had to make sure that the way they move through the space could be quite different, to differentiate between the characters," Hollingsworth says.

"So we looked at all the different motion pathways these drones had the capacity to undertake. There were flight paths that were moving slowly through space, close to the ground and that came across as it looking sad.

"And then having them move radically and flying quite fast and freely, lent itself more to joyousness.

"So we just chipped away at what made the drones different from each other. And that helped form their personalities, in a way to sort of differentiate between them."

Slowly between the six dancers and five drones, Hollingsworth had 11 of the 12 archetypes that were first coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

The roles of friend, jester, leader, sage, and rebel are taken up by the drones, while the caregiver, artist, innocent, seeker, magician and warrior are played by the dancers.

And the 12th archetype? That's the everyman, which Hollingsworth says is played by the audience.

But while Hollingsworth was working a lot of this movement out - at least in the planning phase of the production - the drones were still in Switzerland being coded.

This meant that in the early stages of production, other inanimate objects - including a pilates ball and a broom - were used to visualise where the drones would be within the space.

"It involved a lot of really specific information sharing. So every time that the drone would move, we would have to annotate all the anchor points in that space on the X, Y, and Z coordinates," Hollingsworth says.

"We've got reams of spreadsheets of anchor points. And then, once everything was coded, we had a trip to Zurich to test that all of our calculations were working, and put the show together and found what worked and what didn't, and then kept progressing the work in that way."

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Each drone's movements are pre-programmed within an inch of its life. There is no room for improvisation - as soon as you hit start, the drone will fly exactly the same path as it did every other time.

And it's not a matter of programming five drones and then hitting start. The Lucie drone has a short battery life - according to the Verity Studios website, each has a flight time of up to three minutes, with about an hour of charging time. To create this 60-minute performance, it takes 48 drones to play five characters.

"You know how in the film industry when they have twins playing one baby in a film? It's a little bit the same, except I've got 48 of them," Hollingsworth says.

Lucie in the Sky is a world first. No one is interacting with drones the way these Australasian Dance Collective performers are.

And while it may be a one-off for Hollingsworth, she believes it won't be the end of drones in dance or the arts in general.

"When it comes to drones at the moment, it's associated with everything we know and fear, which is maybe defence and warfare and applications in that domain," Hollingsworth says.

"But there are a lot of applications that can be seen as very positive, from the dispersal of medical supplies, and being able to map and survey things such as the damage caused by bushfires.

"There are a lot of ways that we can harness the good of drones. And maybe in a way, Lucie can shine a light on some of the conversations around technology itself not inherently having good or bad applications - it's the way in which we use it. And having a deeper reflection of the positive applications that drone technology could have in the future."

But beyond that, the choreographer says the arts in general offer a profound way of processing how we envisage a future with technology. Is it one where humanity is at the centre of the narrative, or technology? And where do emotions such as empathy fit in?

It's this conversation surrounding the future of technology and humanity that sees Lucie in the Sky as one of the highlights of the inaugural Uncharted Territory festival later this month.

The 10-day event, which runs from July 7 to 16, will see 50 events bring together creative thinkers, innovators and artists to generate and present original, purposeful and progressive ideas.

"There's been a desire for a number of years to really lean into Canberra's unique position as a knowledge capital and a knowledge economy. And a place where people are here learning, creating, researching, developing new ideas, new businesses," festival director Yolande Norris says.

"Because the festival is engaging with so many different sectors, disciplines, types of research and artistic practice, it by necessity does need to have that diverse format of kinds of events and ways that people can engage."

As well as expert panels and networking events, there will be a selection of demonstrations, installations and activities aimed to get Canberrans thinking.

In addition to dancing drones, this year's program includes events such as First Kiss: A Robotic Pas de Deux - which will see two robots dance, eventually ending in an "intimate and tender kiss" - and A Conversation with a Robot - which features Pepper, the world's most advanced AI retail robot.

The festival features some of the biggest topics of the moment.

"There are some really massive hot topics at the moment, areas that are really important for people to be thinking about and learning and debating," Norris says.

"But it was people first when it came to planning the program. It was a process of talking to different Canberrans in different sectors and industries, to hear what they were working on, and what they were really excited about at the moment."

Lucie in the Sky is at the Canberra Theatre on July 14 and 15. For tickets, go to canberrathearrecentre.com.au.

Uncharted Territory is on from July 7 to 16 at various locations. For the full program, go to unchartedterritory.com.au.

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