Dance Like No One is Whale Watching is an immersive experience and play space created to evoke the fantasy of life as an orca whale. The cosmically charged encounter is wrapped in a billowy inflatable and illuminated with visuals from the open ocean. Audiences’ speech is transformed into whale calls and woven into an ethereal soundtrack. Dance Like No One is Whale Watching offers an infusion of powerful empathy and magic as each group creates the story of their pod in realtime.

Participants are guided through a series of mystic exchanges, collaborative games, and otherworldly performance, inspired by the mighty and mythical existence of orca whales. Between performances, the inflatable is transformed into an interactive play space where audiences swim together in participatory group dives and explore the sonic and visual world of the orca through movement.

Part installation and part dance performance, Dance Like No One is Whale Watching depends on the collective to create the radical dreamspace we so desperately need. Come play! Come move! The award-winning dream team behind Dance Like No One is Whale Watching includes video artist Cari Ann Shim Sham*, dance artist Emily Beattie, sound designer Eric Gunther, and architect Mary Hale.

www.dancelikenooneiswhalewatching.com

Emily Beattie (Choreographer/Performer, Co-creator/director) is a dance artist, performer, and educator based in Somerville. Her performance works traverse the wild space of embodied female experience in an overtechnologized world. She is a recipient of The Boston Foundation’s Next Steps For Boston Dance, Somerville Arts Grant, and Evelyn and Mo Ostin Performing Arts Award. Her performance work for stage, site, and screens has been shown nationally by the Boston CyberArts Festival, the ICA Boston, Gloucester New Arts Festival, Design Boston, Ammerman Center for the Arts, Brown University, Spoke the Hub performance space, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Los Angeles’ Fowler Museum, Pieter Performance Space, the Hammer Museum, UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures/Dance department, and internationally in Quito, Ecuador and Kyoto, Japan for the Kyoto Renku Festival. Emily is grateful to have performed with many amazing artists, most recently with David Rousseve/Reality and Lionel Popkin Dance Project. She is in is the art duo All Real Machines with designer and artist Eric Gunther. Currently she is on faculty at Endicott College, Salem State College, and Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts. emilybeattie.com

Cari Ann Shim Sham* (Video Artist/Designer, Co-creator/director) is a Manhattan based prestidigitator who lives a wild life, often finding herself traveling across borders with cameras and projectors to capture, manipulate, or throw light into screens, objects, and spaces of all sizes. A newly anointed Associate Arts Professor of Dance & New Media at NYU, TISCH School of the Arts Dance Department, she is attracted to things that sparkle, a collector of antique doorknobs, and a lover of champagne. The United Nations General Assembly, Jacob’s Pillow, Mann Chinese Theater and Salamanca Arts Center in Tasmania are some of her favorite places she’s enjoyed presenting work. Her curatorial practice is a decade deep and engages audiences through dance film, virtual reality, and interactive technologies at play. Her live work and video art has shown at Jacob’s Pillow, PS 21, Peak Performances, and the Joyce Soho, along with tech residencies at Krannert, Clarice Smith Art Center, Danspace Project, Dance Place, REDCAT (for the NOW Festival & RADAR LA), and has screened at Laemmle Sunset 7, Mann Chinese Theater, the United Nations General Assembly, and 200+ festivals internationally including Cannes, Austin, Seattle, Dance Camera West, and Dance on Camera Festival, garnering numerous awards.She is the recipient of the Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship and the Chime’s Choreographer Mentorship Exchange, and was a mentor for the ODC Pilot Program’s first ever multi-media residency. Shim Sham recently was the first video artist to redesign the set/sound and video art for Rauschenberg’s Shiner as part of a revival of Set & Reset by Trisha Brown at NYU Tisch Dance, and she’s currently designing set and video art for The Strayhorn project by David Rousseve and for her own video sound sculpture installation Shimmer. She is a Director and Producer for “The Parksville Murders” a 360 degree film Virtual Reality Episodic Horror by Opera on Tap which just won Best VR at the NYC Indie Film Fest, working with Maria Lantin and Peppers Ghost on a new Augmented Reality interactive sound/dance project for the Future of StoryTelling, and delighted to be the lead Filmmaker/Photographer for the Translucent Borders Project of the NYU Global Institute of Advanced Study. cariannshimsham.com

Mary Hale (Architect, Inflatable Designer) AIA is an architect, artist, educator, civic organizer, and founder of the interdisciplinary design practice, ROYHALE Design. ROYHALE’s portfolio spans from architecture to graphics, with installation and environments for events in between. Mary’s passion for designing and building inflatable structures began with “The Monumental Helium Inflatable Wearable Floating Body Mass.” Since then, she has jumped scales to thirty-foot long inhabitables and large wearable inflatables such as “Itinerant Home,” a wearable house commissioned by the New Orleans Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for their annual DesCours Festival. Mary’s work has been recognized in international art, design, and technology publications including the MIT Technology Review. Mary received the AIA Associates Award in 2015. Mary holds a Masters of Architecture from MIT in 2009, and a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies from Brown University in 2002.

Eric Gunther (Sound Artist, Interactive Designer, Software developer) is a multimedia artist working at the intersection of technology, data, and the body. He co-founded Sosolimited, a design studio that creates unique data and technology-driven experiences. At Sosolimited, he has created data-driven sculptures, social media powered light shows, generative fashion, and interactive experiences for clients including HBO, Google, IBM, and Porsche. The studio’s work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Shanghai Biennial. In his art practice, Eric uses dance, sound, and vibrations to generate new aesthetic experiences for the body. He co-directed End Love, a time-bending dance music video for the band OK Go, and collaborates with choreographer Emily Beattie on interactive dance films. Eric is a composer and producer, and has created music and sound design for radio, documentary, dance, and multimedia installations.