France, USA
2025
20'
Summary
Collective Body is an interactive, virtual reality experience that invites us to meet ourselves and each other through movement. Set in the middle of a New Mexican storm, participants are guided to rediscover their first ways of engaging with the world, symbolizing formative life events that culminate in a shared exploration of our embodied selves. These key moments—beginning alone, discovering the unfamiliar, first encounters, and joyfully moving together—represent how our personal and collective stories are written through movement. Designed for 4 participants or more, Collective Body asks: how does a body hold histories over time and how are those histories felt and shared? Collective Body was commissionned by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts,with the support of Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image animée, Ville de Paris, Region Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, Institut Français and Centre des Arts d'Enghien-les-bains.
Producers: Oriane Huard, Aurélie Leduc, Arnaud Colinart
Co-production: ATLAS V, Body of ways, Onassis ONX
Music composer: Harvey Causon
Technical director & developer: Ferdinand Dervieux
Festival | 82nd Mostra de Venise: Venice Immersive 2025: Official In-Competition.
Sarah Silverblatt-Buser
Réalisateur-rice
Sarah Silverblatt-Buser (born in 1992, New Mexico, US) is a director, dancer, choreographer and educator. She moved to Paris in 2018 to perform with acclaimed cirque artist Yoann Bourgeois, and has since danced in various projects including at the Grammy Awards with Harry Styles. She has choreographed works ranging from Street Art, a performance relating neoclassical music with parkour, to La Petite Danseuse in AR for the Musée d’Orsay and Danse, Danse, Danse in VR for the Paris Museum of Modern Art, directed by Gordon. Alongside Gordon, she co-stage directed Rave-L Party, a chamber orchestra performance and rave party for the Théâtre du Châtelet, commissioned by l’Ensemble les Apaches. Collective Body is her first VR piece as a director.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT ON 'COLLECTIVE BODY'
The experience uses virtual reality to open us to different sensations of our physical world while creating a new perception of ourselves as individuals within a collective. We are first guided to reappropriate movement and dancing in our own body, to rediscover our first ways of engaging with the world, before we meet the silent part ourselves that we express through movement.
This otherwise ephemeral self is generated using an algorithmic system that analyses our movement throughout the first two scenes. This self takes the form of an avatar, assigned out of 16 possible avatars, and is represented as a natural element accompanied by a musical theme.
Once we meet this version of ourselves, we are invited to meet another person, encountering them as their movement avatar while being encouraged to share our movement and music together. With our partner, we join the rest of the participants, encountering different ways that others exist through movement, mixing together to create a final moment of joyful, collective discovery in dance. The final moments together invite us to experiment with other embodied ways of being: we have the opportunity to try on different movement avatars, to feel another’s movement identity.
Collective Body asks what it means to experience ourselves in relation to others - without words and beneath the surface. How does a body hold histories over time? How do those histories get expressed and interpreted? How do many bodies create their own ecology?
Gallery
