Amongst putting together the drone spreadsheets and spending hours in the studio trying to choreograph what might not be possible to choreograph, I invited my friend Georgi to come to one of my rehearsals. I didn't have a plan for the rehearsal, I just wanted someone to watch me interact with the drone and see what the reaction was from an audience member. So I connected to the drone via my mobile phone, set it to take off and hover and then only interacted with it by moving around it, underneath it, sometimes pushing it in different directions, rather than controlling it by my phone. Her reaction surprised me a lot, and not to sound too arrogant, I wasn't expected her to be so amazed by me simply playing with the drone and seeing how it reacts to my touch and presence. You can see the result of this playful session in the video, where you can also hear Georgi's reaction. A lot of her comments interested me, and proved to be very valid for my research, she mentioned how she sees the drone as "like a person, like its got a brain" and she feels as though she is watching a duet between two humans, not a human and a drone. She also mentioned ways in which I could take this further, for instance by having a playful section where I'm chasing the drone, like playing a game of tag. I hadn't originally thought of interacting with the drone in this way and improvising with it, as it was decided in the research proposal stage for this project that all the drone movements would be pre-programmed, Georgi asked me that is what I am going to include in my piece, and I replied no, but maybe I should consider it?
From here I then asked Georgi to try interacting with it herself, to see how the drone would react to a different human body. And the movement quality proved to be not as fluid, and it became more of an awkward interaction of both the human and the drone being unsure of how to move with one another. Of course this was to be expected to some extent, as prior to this Georgi had no previous experience of moving with the drone. But by watching me, Georgi said she didn't anticipate how hard it would be. She said "You've got to have a good relationship with it to make it work, because otherwise if you're not connected with it, its not going to work, you've got to move it and its got to move you". This really got me thinking, as I hadn't realised to relationship I had built up with the drone, I was completely unaware of how both the drone and I had got used to moving together and this could potentially prove to be an extremely valid and important observation in my research.
Finally, Georgi also observed that my performance, "as much as its set, it might not work, so there's an element of improvisation" and she is absolutely right. Even if Andrew and I succeed in programming the drone, due to the drone's stabilisation features and sensors, it may react unexpectedly, so there may always be a need for slight improvisation. So perhaps rather than working against this, I'm going to consider working with this improvisation and seeing what I can create with the drone reacting to me.
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