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RAFFAELLO D’ ANDREA AND MAX DEAN

The Robotic Chair
The Robotic Chair is a generic-looking wooden chair with the capacity to fall apart and put itself back together. With shuddering force, the chair collapses to the floor. With persistence and determination, it proceeds to seek out its parts and upright itself. Powered by MICROMO coreless dc motors, The Robotic Chair is distinguished in the world of objects for its capacity to elicit empathy, compassion and hope.

TAO dance theater

4&5
Tao Ye likes to designate his dances by number rather than name. After 4 comes 5, his latest to appear in the US: the 27-year-old choreographer behind Beijing’s six-member Tao Dance Theater is just getting started. And yet he is already a worldwide festival favourite and distinctive to boot, in spite of – or perhaps because of – his deliberately limited means. From 2012, 4 restricted itself to four dancers moving in unison and in a tight cohort within the square of the stage. The dancers’ faces were blacked out, their gaze down, their spines never succumbing to the easy beauty of uprightness, and their voluminous costumes, full of folds and creases, were identical.