Week 3- The Worlds We Made Together
Our final week was only three days — Monday to Wednesday — and somehow it held everything.
Monday — in the garden. We went back to the sculpture garden to record the solos each participant had created with their avatars, danced on-site among the trees and stone. The part that mattered most wasn't the camera in our hands — it was the cameras in theirs. As one participant performed, three or four others, alongside facilitators, filmed the moment from every angle. Those recordings are the seed of whathave b een calling in the projecy iterations the ‘digital duets’: each dancer meeting their avatar on screen — sometimes the participant, sometimes the avatar, sometimes both at once in split screen. We're still building them, but the material is all there, made by them, for each other.
Tuesday — the families came in. With Wi-Fi and tables set up in the multipurpose room, this was our sharing day. But we made a decision early: this is about them, and we wanted families to feel it from the inside, not from a chair at the edge. So we started with our physical practice — the warm-up, the palitos, the mirror, our common choreography — and we invited parents, family, and caregivers to join. Many of them, maybe for the first time, weren't waiting for the workshop to happen; they were in it.
Then came the headsets. We had quietly hoped that one or two participants might want to enter their worlds. Not one hesitated. Every single one wanted in, and each found their own way to move and respond inside it.
The most beautiful surprise came out of the AR itself. Because these worlds are spatial, more than one person can step inside the same one at the same time. That's how Marcelo, his mother, and his grandmother ended up together inside the world Marcelo had built — three generations in the same imaginative space at once. His world had grown out of something he'd asked for himself: to be able to reach out and touch words, to play with language in the air around him. So it was full of floating words, soft glowing auras, little transformations that answered back when you moved. His mother and grandmother weren't watching from the outside. They were in it — reaching for the same words he reached for, playing by the rules he had invented. For a few minutes, the three of them shared a place that came straight out of how Marcelo sees and feels the world.
We finished the session by all participants taking turns to travel the “COLLECTIVE EMBRACE”. the 5 mins VR experience designed from the collective drawing. All particiants drawings ands ewlemnts from their experiences came together, the journey was desinged as a ‘travelator’, you sat and were taken down the path or our joint world.
Wednesday — the celebration. A bright, sunny day. We took our physical practice out around the museum, this time with a surprise — the big, colorful parachute and all the games that come with it. Afterward we simply sat down together, families and friends and facilitators, and shared a picnic. Then hugs, kisses, and goodbyes.
We all left holding the same question: yes to next year — but what could we do in between?
