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Leonardo Electronic Directory
Sita Popat
| Sita Popat School of Performance & Cultural Industries University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT U.K. Email: s.popat@leeds.ac.uk Web: www.leeds.ac.uk/paci/ |
Sita Popat is Senior Lecturer in Dance at University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests centre on relationships between dance choreography and new technologies.
Popat’s ongoing collaborations with scenography academic Scott Palmer and digital artists KMA Creative Technology Ltd have attracted funding from a range of sources, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. Popat led the team in their primary research project, Projecting Performance (2006-8), investigating the role of the technical operator as performer using projected digital sprites in theatrical performance. Popat and Palmer have also worked as consultants for KMA, advising on the creation of Dancing in the Streets, an installation in the city centre of York (UK). The installation used an infrared camera and computer to transform participants’ body heat into projected light forms, encouraging playful behaviour that resulted in people literally dancing in the streets. Outcomes from collaborative projects include numerous academic papers and presentations, together with direct impact on professional performance practice, most notably in DV8 Physical Theatre’s ‘To Be Straight With You’. Underpinning Popat’s research is the use of performance perspectives to model design processes in a technological society. Popat was the choreography researcher for Emergent Objects: SpiderCrab, which employed movement analysis techniques in the design of innovative computer control mechanisms for a giant dancing robotic limb. Other projects include e-Dance, combining choreography and e-Science tools. Popat is the author of Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography and Internet Communities (Routledge, 2006) and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. |
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| Updated 25 June 2009. |
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