Meet Sydney Skybetter | Choreographer & Professor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sydney Skybetter and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sydney, we’d love for you to start things off by telling us something about your industry that we and others not in the industry might be unaware of?
I’m regularly in dialogue with dancerly folks at Google who make gestural human / computer interfaces, choreographers at digital agencies that work on immersive art design, and dancers at Pixar that work on virtual embodiment, among so many, many others. A lot of folks, understandably, think choreographers only work on stages to create performances by dancers. Choreographers are, in fact, employed in all manner of ways across all sorts of sectors! I regularly work with dancerly folks hired by Google to make gestural human / computer interfaces, or digital agencies to work on immersive art design, or at places like Pixar where they think through how virtual bodies signify. Here at Brown University, I teach choreorobotics, and am often called upon by companies to advise on how to make robotic and computational systems more expressive. Choreography is all about bodies and space, but the bodies in question can be mechanical, and the space can be virtual.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
For the last decade or so, I’ve been professionally preoccupied with how bodies meet computational systems. To me, how Facebook (or, you know, the NSA) tracks our movements through space and time is a fundamentally choreographic problem, as is the design of interfaces for emerging technologies. Dance history has a lot to say about how these things work, and I’ve published and spoken extensively about overlaps across choreographic theory and surveillant practice. In the beginning though, a lot of folks were like, NSA and dance history? Sure dude, whatever. After years and years of work, a few generous researchers at places like Mozilla and MIT started asking me to talk with their teams about bodies, surveillance, security and robotics. At this point, well, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person I know who writes for both WIRED and Dance Magazine.

Today, I’m a Professor at Brown University. I teach my students about embodiment and emerging technologies, and espouse an ethic of prioritizing bodily concern in design and computational environments. I carry a great deal of embodied and situated privilege. To a great extent, I’m viewed as credible as a result of my physical appearance and institutional credentials. The thing that actually makes me good at my work is that, before I became a professor, I was a dancer. I was a dancer for a very, very long time. I worked for decades to master the movements of my own body, gain expertise in communicating about embodiment to others, and learn how to collaborate with others in extremely high risk performance environments. I can speak to how bodies interface with complex systems because that’s what dancers are trained to do. If you’re hiring someone to design something that exists in relation to human bodies, hire a dancer!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I’m a fairly carbohydrate motivated individual, so I’d start with the croissants at Chaumont or pan dulce at Panaderia San Fernando. We’d obviously check out some dance shows: there’s some *incredible* choreographers that work extensively in LA, like Kyle Abraham, Laura Miller, Dawn Stoppiello, Kate Ladenheim, and Benjamin Millipied. I’d probably grab a beer and burger with the Sundance nerds at The Counter, a lecture at the USC Kaufman, and close out the day by running the kids through the fountain at The Music Center.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Shout out to my mom and dad, Christine Ledbetter and Dean Skylar! When I was growing up, they regularly drove me across state lines to get me to ballet classes, and somehow managed to put me through advanced training in dance conservatories around the country. Now a parent myself, I understand their virtuosity in a way I couldn’t possibly appreciate as a kid. Parenting a dancer isn’t easy. It’s a demanding art that promises little, but I draw on the skills they labored to grant me access to literally every day.

Website: www.skybetter.org

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sydneyskybetter/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skybetter/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sydneyskybetter

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sydney.skybetter/

Other: www.choreographicinterfaces.org

Image Credits
Headshot by Lisa Voll. Flight image by Safety Third Productions.