Digital Dreams, 2020.
The dance film “Digital Dreams” is a performance supplement to Randall Belyea’s honors thesis entitled “Digital Dreams: Performing Our Fantasies and Modern Media.” In his thesis, Randall explores the connections between media intake and live, expressive performance, particularly as an increasingly technological society challenges our notions of practicing community through performance. The film piece physicalizes this research, by having dancers write about, analyze, and then perform the personal impact of their favorite media. A clash between the real worlds of the dancers and the digital worlds inside their heads unfolds throughout the piece, so that the viewer gets a glimpse of what performing in a hybrid society looks like for beings of perpetual media.