Steph Hutchison
Steph Hutchison is an artist-researcher, choreographer, performer, and teaching-artist. Steph has a rich dance practice as a solo choreographer/performer and collaborator within dance and technology contexts. As a dance artist Steph creates and performs primarily improvised solo dance works that focus on extreme physicality and endurance of the human body, or engage a dialogue with digital technologies and systems. Steph’s work is also informed by her collaborations with motion capture, animation, robotics, haptics, and artificially intelligent performance agents. She has collaborated extensively on art, research, and industry projects with Deakin Motion.lab (2009 – 2016), John McCormick (2014 – present), and Louis-Philippe Demers (2018). As a teaching-artist Steph began her practice as Artist in Residence for Arts Centre Melbourne (2005 – 2011). Teaching artistry underpins Steph’s work as a dance academic.
Steph completed her PhD research at Deakin University’s Motion.lab – meta: discourses from dancers inside action machines. Her PhD research was informed by her choreographic and performance practice in contemporary dance, circus arts, improvisation and technology contexts. In meta, Steph researched the dancer’s experience within different systems – techniques and practices of the body, environments, with equipment, and technologies. She was focused on how systems operate to produce new kinds of bodies in dance. This builds on her Master of Arts research into the hybrid body in dance, and is applied within her collaborations and the development of her teaching practice. Understanding systems and working in collaboration with systems and technologies enables Steph to collaborate extensively on research projects such as Dance Haptics – making dance performance accessible to vision impaired, blind and deaf-blind people. And, to teach in transdisciplinary contexts where embodied practice and embodied experiences can be developed to transform participant’s experience, knowledge and ideas as they work in creative collaborations with digital technologies. Steph’s current research builds upon her Physical Thinking Prototypes establishing processes, methods and systems for constructing dancing bodies and ways of thinking in the digital age. Physical Thinking Prototypes also provided a methodology for calibrating participants systems within the Ars Electronica Futurelab Academy at QUT (2017 & 2018) – enabling, opening and creating potentials via embodied practice and experience.