OVERFLOW

Overflow is a kinetic light sculpture commissioned by leading choreographer Alexander Whitley as an integral part of Overflow, his extraordinary new dance work that questions what it means to be human in the era of big tech and big data. Overflow premiers in May 2021 at Sadler’s Wells, London before touring internationally.

Children of the Light worked closely with Whitley to create a work and set that told this story. 

At the heart of the brief was the need to communicate the uncertain tension between our fear of, the seduction by, technology. Whilst technology has transformed our lives, often for the better, and keeps doing so at an accelerated rate, worries about our ever-deepening reliance on technology and the immanent emergence of intelligent machines are becoming ever more real.

For inspiration Children of the Light drew on the plot and neurotic atmosphere of Bladerunner, Ridley Scott’s seminal 1982 translation of Philip K Dick’s dystopic sci-fi novel, Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? to the big screen. In it, Detective Rick Deckard is tasked with tracking down and eliminating androids so advanced that it impossible, without testing, to tell them apart from humans.

Children of the Light created a work that is at once a sculpture and narrative character, whose behavior, manifest here in movement – the piece can move freely on all its axes - and luminosity, could elicit empathic and emotive responses from the dancers and audience. Thus the piece becomes – like so much contemporary technology – both a mirror and screen onto which we human project our own selves and fantasies in a mental and psychological dance – at once beautiful and threatening.