Daniel Gwirtzman Interview — Deep Dive Into e-Motion

Here, Picture This Post (PTP) asks Daniel Gwirtzman (DG) to elaborate on his thinking in creating this piece.

(PTP) What was the spark that interested you in creating e-Motion?

(DG) The impetus to create the work was the desire to look into the way our present has caught up with our long held ideas, hopes and concerns, about the future, and the impacts of technology as it continues to encroach on us. What is gained, what has been lost?

With e-Motion, specifically, how sentience may come into being in machines.

What is it to feel?

Isn’t this one of the age-old questions?

How does feeling work?

What separates us from other species?

What is it to be human in a digital age?

These were the questions that provoked the project, arising from a series of conversations with playwright Saviana Stanescu, with whom I collaborated on the work. The spark of our common interest in AI ignited the birth of e-Motion. Thinking about the future and technology’s impact has been a theme in the Company’s repertory since Plasma Field, an evening-length dance, premiered at the Merce Cunningham Studio in 1999.

How did e-Motion evolve from creative spark to the finished work it is today?

The research for us--the story was devised mutually with Saviana --focused primarily on the development of AI and the humanistic side of this larger story, living with AI and how it is invading and pervading every aspect of our lives. Very early on in the process Saviana and I created the arc of the narrative. From there she produced a script, which served as a structure from which to begin choreographing.

The text, presented as recorded dialogues and monologues, forms the central part of the score, augmented with electronic music composed by Jeff Story (1966-2022), the Company’s decades-long collaborator.

The narrative allowed for choreography that might otherwise be wholly abstract to take on specific connotations. It is precisely because verbal language is attached to the movement language that a viewer may enter the world of abstraction in dance and see how movements can represent concrete meanings, how there is a structure and lexicon to dance. The movement vocabulary repeats alongside the repeating text, certain gestures can signify certain words, or themes, or emotions.

The work has evolved since its initial premiere in May of 2023. Rehearsing it recently for the La MaMa Moves Festival (2025) required re-learning a dense and detailed body of choreography. This was a clarifying process. As with most repertory that is revisited or stays actively embodied, our understanding of what we were doing both technically and performatively evolved. We became more knowledgeable about, and comfortable with, the material. As a dancer, this allows for a greater sense of freedom and play. I allowed a few passages of new choreography to replace older sections.

How has your understanding of AI evolved as you worked on e-Motion?

Much has changed in the three years since this project began. Chat GPT was light years away from its strength and capacities now. We had to explain to audiences at that time what Chat GPT was and how to use it! The exponential acceleration of AI directly informed the way I perform the piece.

Much as AI builds off what it already knows and uses this pre-existing information, these billions of datasets, to create new content, I considered how H’s own performance could continue to grow, extend, morph, and innovate. I observed how it learns from its previous responses, much the way a child or student does. I tried to enter the mindspace of ChatGPT, predicting its processes and patterns, its lexicon, its references, its repetitions. The randomness of ChatGPT became a structure for me to work with choreographically. That within a tightly-prescribed structure there is evidence of disruption, freedom, being off the grid in some way, the unexpected, chaos. This has translated compositionally into highly-rigorous phrases and scenarios that allow for departure. The lanes in the pool become removed, allowing me as a performer the space for unregulated open swim.

The progress in making robots walk more realistically has continued to evolve. The similarities of the machine’s rise serves as a terrific metaphor for a dancer to hold onto, the quixotic quest for perfection, for absoluteness, setting up the charge to be sharper, quicker, smarter.

What changed the most emotionally, from a character research place, was understanding how AI was fulfilling roles as companions to people on a deeply emotional level. These attachments allowed the affection Ava shows to H resonate more realistically for me, and also to consider the real emotions H is communicating and professing to feel.

How has robot imagery from film or other art forms shaped your work on this piece?

It didn’t. The point of H, the creature I portray, is that H is so sophisticated that H (who doesn’t have pronouns!) is achieving things previously unthought of from such technology.

The advancement of H’s physicality could be confused with a human’s. I didn’t want H to move or act like a robot. There are none of these tropes. This said, the intellectual rigor of the machine manifests through highly precise movements, which can have a rigid or mechanical quality at times. But languid movements equally are present. It was important that H is not some sort of stereotypical robot.

What shaped your work on both sound and projections design?

Composer Jeff Story died unexpectedly, as a young man in his 50s, as the piece was coming to be. I wanted to create a score that could keep his music alive and pay tribute to him, using music he had given the Company to use for different projects. I worked on the sound design out of necessity. Had Jeff been here the score would have been entirely different. Jeff was a huge fan of this type of recycling of music and had given me permission to edit his work. He was unusually unprecious and generous.

This type of repurposing also connected to the theme of AI, repeatedly using the same data to create some new response from it. Jeff and I shared this love for futuristic themes and enjoyed ruminating on the rise of technology and the casualties therein. He had an expansive and brilliant mind.

In 2023 DGDC (Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company) collaborated with a Cornell professor, who came up with a baseline of projections for the piece. I inherited this role out of necessity too with this current season and greatly expanded the visual environment, with projections playing a much larger role. Knowing the piece well I understood how the projections could enhance and support the narrative. In the end, the projections were tied fully to the score, second by second, note by note, helping to remind us that technology is the spine of this story.

Really all we do know now is that we don’t know so much of how this could be distorted, applied, the effects of the powers we have unleashed. The piece is presenting these ethical questions, it is completely of our time, of this moment when much of what we know and how we operate is up for grabs. We have found that audiences enjoy being on this journey with us, questioning and reflecting on the complex attachments we continue to have with AI.

This is a tipping point.

Do you seek to have all your choreography speak to “hot topics” like AI or is this unusual?

Unusual. This piece stands out as anomalous among the repertory. The repertory is known for its innovation, humor, stylistic diversity, musicality, charisma and accessibility, but typically exists in a more universal place.

How does your practice as a teacher shape your work as a choreographer?

I love this question because usually I am asked how my work as a choreographer or dancer influences my teaching.

On that subject, this semester, I also work as a professor at Ithaca College, sections of e-Motion were woven into a Partnering in Dance class, allowing students to engage with the choreography first-hand. This allowed me as a choreographer to witness a range of new interpretations for Ava and H. My students excel in devising their own way through given material. It opened up my eyes to the infinite possibilities available.

A choreographer is a teacher. These roles are inseparable. As a choreographer, one is constantly clarifying and teaching movement, coaching dancers, encouraging them to take risks and fulfill their potential as physical artists. Teaching with regularity reminds and encourages me as a choreographer and performer to take these conceptual, artistic, physical, and expressive risks, to practice what I preach. It emboldens me to be vulnerable, to take chances, to be fearless.

What are some of the milestones of your journey as a dancer and choreographer?

My mother wrote in my baby book that I was sitting like a dancer, stretched as I would with one leg straight in front, and the other folded behind. She says I told her in the 4th grade I was going to be a dancer. From the time I was born I was dancing. I was fortunate to grow up in Rochester, NY, home of Garth Fagan Dance. I began studying with members of this troupe when twelve. When sixteen, instead of continuing to attend summer overnight camp with friends I’d known since I was a child, I went to Chautauqua Institution for a six-week Martha Graham workshop. I don’t think I ever truly decided. I was born a dancer and never questioned the immense love for, and affinity I had to, dance. I was fortunate to have parents who fully supported this decision to major in dance and pursue this as a profession.

As a life-long dancer I understand first-hand a life devoted to fusing the physical with the intellectual, of working out bodily algorithms to be performed on demand, of challenging the instrument to break boundaries and explore physical and cognitive limits. While this is before my professional history started, it’s important to share that I started folk dancing in elementary school--haven't stopped dancing since--as this dance form has informed a practice and pedagogy that seeks to celebrate humanity and community. After graduating from The University of Michigan with a BFA in Dance I began working and touring as a dancer with the internationally-renowned companies Garth Fagan Dance and Mark Morris Dance Group. In 1995 I co-founded Artichoke Dance Company, a repertory troupe. In 1998 the nonprofit Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company was formed.

2025 marks my thirtieth year as a New York company director and choreographer. I have strived to challenge myself, the work I produce and the audiences with whom the work engages. Coming from a theatrical background I have consistently straddled the line separating abstraction from narration. This dual focus stems from my dancing body, which combines pedestrianism and sharp virtuosity. This synthesis is long cultivated from divergent influences, chief among them folk dance, which has and continues to inform my practice and pedagogy significantly.

Dance is inherently optimistic and aspirational. It is through effort and determination that dancers come into being, to overcome gravity in the raising of a leg, or to jump against the earth that roots us. The seemingly impossible becomes possible through the fusion of our mind, body, and heart. Dancers know this fantastically rich existence.

Musicality, physicality, humor, charisma and accessibility are values of my work. I seek to promote these qualities in the work I create. The intersection of people is at its heart. I seek to challenge risk-taking and trust as physical exemplars of the possible, of what the human body/mind can achieve.

In the disturbing reality of the world today, as values and progress erode, my interest is to create a space to reflect on the repercussions these shifts provoke and to offer optimism. I seek to position disruption and loss against continuity and connection, and explore new ways of partnering both as metaphors to the anxieties of the near and present danger, and the limitless possibilities for empathy and generosity. My work seeks to reveal humanity and celebrate human achievement.

Projects are interactive, creating a common shared experience, giving audiences the opportunity to become active participants. I am interested in activating a space that attracts the greatest common denominator of people, providing an understanding of ways to experience dance. It is precisely being a dancer in a technologically-driven era that informs each day with meaning, satisfaction, joy, and gratitude, an analog antidote to the digital reality of screens, keyboards, cables, and data.

Tuning out the world by tuning into one’s body is an escape into the natural world, connecting bodily and cellularly to the evolution of our species over eons.

Editor's Note-- For more information visit the Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company website.