The Four World Ages
Extended Reality
The Four World Ages draws on Nigerian-Igbo myth to tell the history of humanity as it unfolds through four eras: the Age of Universal Oneness, the Age of Self-Awareness, the Age of Civilization, and our current Age of Chaos. This piece features four dancers who enact this sweeping saga.
The spatial augmented reality system created for this performance blended artificial intelligence, computer vision, motion capture technology, custom-built software, and real-time 3D rendering to accurately recognize, track, and film the movement of the four Black dancers while projecting sacred African cosmological symbols onto them. This system marked a significant advance in detecting and tracking dark skin tones at high speeds. This technology, combined with interactive projection mapping, enhanced the performance narrative by synchronizing digital and light effects with the dancers' movements, conveying symbolic elements of their journey—breaking apart from unison, disintegrating into the ether, navigating the upside-down world of our current Age of Chaos, and vibrating with the spiritual ideograms of creation.
Creative Director: Marques Redd
Art Director: Mikael Owunna
Movement Director: Marquita Sams
Assistant Director: Dominique Swift
Dancers: Ashley Eleby, Billy J Hawkains III, Jordan Cowan, Rishell Maxwell
Engineers: Jiajian Zhang, Keyin Wu, Kyungseo Cho, Shuyue Wang, Yuan Suo
The creation of The Four World Ages was made possible with the support of the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grants Program, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center, Office for Public Art (Pittsburgh), and The Yard.