Hungry Sharks Company - Destination FCKD

Destination FCKD explores the phenomenon of NPCing as an in real life answer to human simulations in digital worlds. Six performers tackle physical and philosophical aspects on non-playable characters in a surreal scape of movements. The basis for this is a library of more than 200 NPCs developed in the creation process and their abilities with respect to rhythm, space, sound and narrative. NPC is short for non-player character and refers to artificial identities reduced to the essence of their functionality with a minimum of means. They execute repeating tasks, communicate with a highly restricted vocabulary and act in pre-defined loops.

Replaying – stops, reversions, glitches – is a method of developing movements extracted from the field of street and club styles, which are used as choreographic structures of improvisation in Destination FCKD. The morphing devised for the piece is derived from image generation processes employed by artificial intelligence. Errors, distortions and glitches form the underlying aesthetic and narrative language, superimposing the interpretative spaces of the dance performance as socio-critical filters and pointing to a human plane behind the algorithm.

Inspired by artificial and real worlds, dance and choreography in Destination FCKD thus become an inclusive interplay of various qualities of movement, in which IRL errors and digital artefacts collide in a stage context.