ABOUT

Manchester Science Festival is produced by the Science and Industry Museum. It runs for eleven days, incorporating over 100 events across Greater Manchester for families and adults.

Corey Baker is an award-winning choreographer and filmmaker, celebrated for his innovation and commitment to driving dance into the 21st century. Giant Leaps was specially commissioned for the Manchester Science Festival to support Corey Baker's ambition of working with the European Space Agency to understand how humans’ movements are impacted by different atmospheres, with the ultimate ambition of designing a dance for astronauts.

We were commissioned to collaborate with Corey Baker Dance, to create an interactive, immersive installation that sparked interest in Corey's Mission and STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and math). To design and produce an engaging, fun, and otherworldly experience, that would generate an emotional connection from the audience.

Building on our past motion reactive work with Choreographer Janis Claxton, we took our learnings and pushed the creative and technology to the next level. Harnessing state-of-the-art depth data sensors, to develop specialist software that allowed us to design motion-reactive particle systems, with aesthetics and physics inspired by imagery of galaxies from the James Webb and Chandra X-ray Observatories.

Movement, depth, and colour data, were translated into thousands of stars, each with its own physics. The stars orbit and pull together like a galaxy, each unique to every visitor, before bursting outwards, spraying starlight out into the environment around the audience and dancers.

We utilised holographic gauze to capture the real-time animation, generated by the visitors. The specialist silver-lined gauze captured the stars and held them central to the large open space, so that the galaxies floated in an illusionary way. In the distance the earth can be seen, the space between the galaxies created by the audience members, and the earth, became the performance space for Corey Baker's dancers. Dancing in space, as stars poured over them. The music throughout the space added to the atmosphere and the audience was offered props - brightly coloured materials to encourage playful movement.

The success of Giant Leaps at the Manchester Science Festival was followed by an extended 14-week run at the National Science and Media Museum.