Projects
Different Bodies – Dancing with Robots
Coventry Centre for Dance Research Candoco & Jay Gearing Helpston
*image: Professional dancers Welly O’Brien, Annie Edwards and Kat Hawkins | Photos: Patrick Brundell and Rachael Garrett*
Different Bodies uses dance, performance and filmmaking to explore how dancers with disabilities come into close physical interaction with robots. Conceptually, the project examines themes of close bodily contact, risk and vulnerability while deliberately challenging the normative assumptions about disability that pervade artificially intelligent technologies. It builds upon a previous collaboration between the University of Nottingham and the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University to personalise prostheses by ‘dancing with algorithms’, and a UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub project that explore the creative possibilities offered by dancing with robots.
Coventry Centre for Dance Research
TAS Hub Dancing with robots 01
TAS Hub Dancing with robots 02
Horizon: Expressive Personalisation of Consumer Products through Dance
Team Members and Project Collaborators
Rachael Garrett studies the intersection of bodies, ethics and autonomous technologies, especially physical or proximate interactions with robots. Rachael has collaborated with the research team for over three years and coordinates this project.
Kate Marsh is a disabled dance artist-researcher with over 20 years of experience in performing, teaching, making and researching dance.
Welly O’Brien is an independent performer and professional dancer.
Annie Edwards is a dance artist whose interests lie in improvisation, collaborative processes and disability advocacy. Her approach to dance is as a way to inhabit and understand the body expansively.
Jay Gearing is a filmmaker and artist based in Cambridgeshire. Socially engaged practice is at the heart of Jay’s artistic work. Highly motivated by the power and potential of film to be representative, to provoke and to highlight multiple issues impacting on people and the world around them.
Simon-Castle Green is a Senior Technical Specialist working in the University of Nottingham’ Cobot Maker Space and the School of Computer Science.
Stacy Hsueh draws on critical theory to interrogate computing norms and uses design methods to co-imagine tech futures rooted in self-determination and joy.
Sarah Whatley is the former director of the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, focusing on the interface between dance and new technologies, dance analysis, somatic dance practice and pedagogy, and inclusive dance.
Outputs and Highlights
Garrett, R., 2026. Somatic Freedoms: Reconfiguring Human-Machine Ethical Relations (Doctoral dissertation, KTH Royal Institute of Technology).
Whatley, S., Marsh, K., Benford, S., Garrett, R., Tennent, P. and Castle-Green, S., 2026. Touch, agency and the interplay between dance, disability and robotics. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, pp.1-19.
Benford, S., Schneiders, E., Avila, J.P.M., Caleb-Solly, P., Brundell, P.R., Castle-Green, S., Zhou, F., Garrett, R., Höök, K., Whatley, S. and Marsh, K., 2025, March. Somatic safety: An embodied approach towards safe human-robot interaction. In 2025 20th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 429-438). IEEE.
Rachael Garrett, Patrick Brundell, Simon Castle-Green, Kat Hawkins, Paul Tennent, Feng Zhou, Airi Lampinen, Kristina Hook, Steve Benford. Friction in Processual Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethical Relations in Interdisciplinary Research. CHI ’25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Article No.: 400, Pages 1 – 15
Rachel Garrett, Kat Hawkins, Patrick Brundell, SimonCastle-Green, Paul Tennent, Feng Zhou, Airi Lampinen, Kristina Hook, Steve Benford. In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice. CHI ’25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Article No.: 407, Pages 1 – 18
Workshop 25 & 26 September 2025