Pierre Godard ( FR ) & Liz Santoro ( US)
This Is Unreal
Dance & AI
Closing in Aix-en-Provence
Friday, January 15, 2027
at 8:00 p.m.
Pavillon Noir
Aix-en-Provence
Combined ticket for two shows: This Is Unreal & by dIAboli
Credits
An evening co-produced with the Ballet
Preljocaj
Ballet Preljocaj and the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques are teaming up for an evening where dance meets artificial intelligence.
On stage, Liz Santoro tells the story of her life through dance. Her childhood in Boston, ballet, New York, Paris, motherhood, and the pieces she created with Pierre Godard. Except that here, it’s impossible to tell what’s real from what’s not: some memories are real, while others are generated by artificial intelligence. Some movements come from her body; others come from an algorithm trained on her dancing.
“This Is Unreal ” creates a hybrid world where the authentic and the synthetic blend together.
Cast
Pierre Godard and Liz Santoro : concept, direction, text and choreography
Liz Santoro performs
Pierre-Yves Macé (as well as Chopin, Mozart, Tchaikovsky…) music
Mélanie Rattier space, light
Rezvan Farsijani costumes
Anaïs Vallières, Beatrice Pozzi, interns
Léo Chédin Generative AI
One evening, two works, and the same sense of vertigo—that of a world where humans and machines have become one.
Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard
Since 2011, the Franco-American choreographers Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard have been collaborating closely to create generative and algorithmic choreographic works that seek to subvert our habitual patterns of attention. For Liz Santoro, a classical training at the Boston Ballet, a degree in neuroscience from Harvard, and a career as a performer on New York’s experimental scene have fostered an inexhaustible curiosity about what the human body is capable of. For Pierre Godard, a deliberate path from science to directing and choreography—via a dissertation on artificial intelligence—fuels his reflections on the future of dance and its connection to society as a whole.
The uniqueness of their respective artistic journeys has led them to develop original choreographic systems—centered on movement and text—that offer audiences playful and hypnotic experiences.
Their work has been presented in France, Europe, North America, and Asia. They have created various group pieces, including *We Do Our Best* ( 2012), *Relative Collider* ( 2014), *For Claude Shannon* ( 2016), *Maps* ( 2017), *Noisy Channels* ( 2018 and 2019), *Stereo* ( 2019), *Scales* ( 2019), *Tempéraments* (2019), Mutual Information (2021), The Game of Life (2022), as well as site-specific works such as Watch It ( 2012), Quarte ( 2014), FCS Redux ( 2017), Mass over Volume ( 2017), Learning ( 2018 and 2019), Contrepoints ( 2023). Watch It received a Bessie Award in 2013 in the category “Outstanding Production for a work at the forefront of contemporary dance.” In 2021, the work Contrepoints was selected as a winner of the “Mondes nouveaux” program initiated by the Ministry of Culture.
