Client
Jacob's Pillow
What we delivered
Music Composition
Creative team
Catie Cuan
Ken Goldberg,
Peter Van Straten
This captivating durational duet created by dancer/choreographer/engineer Catie Cuan and artist/researcher Ken Goldberg pairs Cuan with an industrial robot arm for an eight-hour dance performance that unfolds over the timespan of a single American workday. The event begins at 2pm and concludes with an artist talk with Cuan and Goldberg at 10pm, moderated by NS+ curator Elena Park.
Performed to a soundtrack including original compositions by Peter Van Straten, Breathless will contrast the beauty, strength, and frailty of the human body with the relentless precision of machinery. In the debut of their ambitious new piece, Cuan and Goldberg address the historical, cultural, and emotional complexity of our collective fears about artificial intelligence and the future of human labor with the significant technical gaps that remain between science fiction and contemporary robotics. At the conclusion of the eight-hour ritual, the artists will join NS+ Curator Elena Park for a conversation, including audience Q&A.
The Breathless premiere at NationalSawdust+ was made possible by the generous support of Kathryn and Emmanuel Morlet and the Westcustogo Foundation, which supports the series.
Breathless: Catie and the Robot is co-commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow and NationalSawdust+.
It is also sponsored, in part, by UC Berkeley’s AUTOLab. Breathless is a sponsored project of Jacob’s Pillow, where it was developed, in part, in the Pillow Lab.
The robots are graciously loaned by Universal Robots.
“Catie and the Robot” had its world premiere in December 2023, In the National Sawdust theater in Brooklyn. Featured here, a dynamic performance of a piece composed for two marimbas.