AI can generate images, voices, music and movement in seconds, but it cannot sweat, stumble, breathe, show vulnerability or imperfection, or share a room with an audience. As the performing arts sector adjusts to the synthetic age and explores new digital extensions of human experience, several sessions and performances at October’s Communicating the Arts Ottawa–Gatineau placed the human body at the centre of the conversation
For the past few years, the cultural sector has mostly asked what artificial intelligence (AI) can do, and how soon. It can already generate images, compose music, clone voices and write scripts, and each new release makes the last one look provisional. For the performing arts, however, a more useful question sits underneath: what gains value when almost anything can be generated?
Decades before generative AI, the American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham captured the idea in six words: “The body says what words cannot.” In the age of the prompt, those words sound unexpectedly contemporary.
But putting the body back at the centre is not a nostalgic gesture against technology. Technology can extend, translate and reinterpret physical presence, but never fully replace it. What remains is movement, vulnerability and unpredictability.
Can we really trust the body more than the machine? Not necessarily, and that may be the point. A performer can hesitate, fail, tire, surprise us or behave differently from one performance to the next. In a cultural landscape increasingly populated by generated and optimised experiences, that uncertainty may become one of culture’s most valuable currencies.
Several contributions to Communicating the Arts Ottawa–Gatineau 2026, held under the theme “Building Trust, Bridging Worlds” (Construire la confiance, rouvrir le dialogue), explored this tension from very different directions.
The body as data, but still human
Montreal-based new media artist and filmmaker Allison Moore paired contemporary dance with live volumetric capture in Cloud Bodies: How Human Presence Can Transform Digital Worlds, an immersive media performance. Sensors tracked the movements of dancer Lucy Fandel and translated them into geometric metadata, which was processed in real time and rebuilt inside an immersive environment. There it merged with point-cloud landscapes made from photogrammetric scans of Vancouver Island forests, until the dancer’s body started to resemble the terrain around it.
The piece inverted the usual story about AI. Nobody was manufacturing a substitute performer, and the digital world had nothing to do until a person moved. It also raised a question the sector has been slow to put to itself: what happens to a body once it has been captured? Movement recorded as data can, in principle, be stored, reused and reworked long after the performance ends. If physical presence is as valuable as the sector now says it is, then questions of who owns it and who gets paid for it matter to artists and producers as much as they do to lawyers. Moore’s session gave delegates a working example to argue over.
What you cannot polish
Gail Green’s workshop, Presence Builds Trust: How You Show Up Shapes How You’re Believed and Received, took the body into a less spectacular setting, the meeting room. Her subject was the signals we send before a sentence is finished: body language, vocal delivery, emotional alignment and the ways a posture, a hesitation or a tone of voice can support what is said or undercut it.
The timing was apt. Written communication has become cheap: emails can be polished, presentations drafted and messages optimised by software, so polish no longer tells a funder or a board much about the person behind it. What is harder to fake is how someone behaves when the question is difficult. For arts leaders dealing with staff, donors and communities, the workshop sat close to the conference’s own theme, since trust is built between people, in real time.
Clothes need bodies
Cadence, created by producer Cat Burton with fashion designer Cathy Trostle-Olivar, took the form of a live catwalk exploring transition, growth and self-reflection. The title borrows from music, where a cadence closes one phrase and opens the next. Each garment embodies an emotion linked to personal change. Trostle-Olivar works with bamboo knit, deadstock and second-hand fabrics, so part of the material has already had a life before it reaches the catwalk, which suits a collection about change.
A garment also resists digitisation in practical ways. Fabric hangs differently on each person who walks in it, a silhouette shifts with posture, and a catwalk exists only while one group of bodies moves and another watches. An image of a dress can be generated in seconds. It says nothing about how that dress behaves on someone.
Presence as evidence
None of this means audiences will suddenly turn away from AI, or that cultural organisations should. But it may change what we value. If a voice can be cloned, hearing one live in a room starts to mean something different. And in a world of increasingly polished communication, even a hesitation, a breath or a mistake can remind us that there is someone in the room with us.
So perhaps the point is not to defend the body from technology at all. It is to work out what we want the relationship between the two to be. Communicating the Arts proved a good place to start.
To find out more about Communicating the Arts, visit communicatingthearts.com
