Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard , This Is Unreal

From the stage, Liz Santoro recounts her life story through dance. Her childhood, ballet, New York, Paris, motherhood, the pieces she created with Pierre Godard. Except here, it’s impossible to untangle truth from fiction: some memories are real, others are generated by artificial intelligence. Some movements come from her body, others from an algorithm trained on her dancing.
This Is Unreal creates a hybrid world where the authentic and the synthetic contaminate each other. The music slides from romantic piano to algorithmic variations and pop music. It is an autobiographical pact gone awry — an autofiction for the age of deepfakes, a dizzying and unsettling game. Where does the body end? Where does the machine begin? And what if it’s precisely this indeterminacy that defines us today?

Pierre Godard is an artist and performance maker with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Paris-Saclay University. With a background in applied mathematics and linguistic engineering, his research has focused on unsupervised word discovery and computational language documentation, particularly in low-resource languages. Together with choreographer Liz Santoro Godard creates performances that explore the intersection of dance, technology, and AI, pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance art. Liz Santoro is a choreographer and dancer with a background in neuroscience from Harvard University and professional training from the Boston Ballet School. In addition to her choreographic works, Santoro's artistic practice encompasses considerable pedagogical engagement through her curation, teaching, outreach, and mentoring.

In English with German surtitles.

Duration: 50 mins.

As part of MODINA, the symposium Dancing in the Digital Age: Bodies, Codes, and Affective Futures will take place on 24 January, featuring keynote speeches, panel discussions and a lecture performance.