We are delighted to congratulate Studio resident Laura Kriefman on being awarded one of the first Creative Fellowships from The Space/WIRED joint initiative. Laura’s company The Guerilla Dance Project fuses movement and technology. The company’s work is driven by one core aim: to reconnect our bodies with the environment.

Laura will be spending the next year awakening city giants and teaching them to dance. Mass Crane Dance is “a synchronised dance routine across the entirety of a city skyline, set to music, using all the industrial construction cranes”. Laura will work with the construction companies to use the cranes’ embedded data capture systems to choreograph their movement whilst developing a new choreographic language specific to cranes.

By partnering with a city-wide radio station to broadcast the soundtrack, Mass Crane Dance will avoid any noise pollution. At dusk, citizens will gather in their chosen location to watch the lit-up cranes dance in synchronicity. Mass Crane Dance can be observed from anywhere in the city, creating a large-scale city spectacle, as well as breaking down any access barriers, and bringing together the city’s construction, art and citizens. 

There will be a prototype performance of Mass Crane Dance in Bristol in October 2015, with a full performance planned for London in spring 2016.

“When we think of building sites we imagine noise, dust, hoardings that hide everything away and huge metal structures that swell from invisible bases. How often do we look up and observe the majestic dance of construction? I have been fascinated over the last few years by the beauty and elegance of the large 60 foot construction cranes and wish to choreograph a syncronised dance for them that can be viewed from anywhere in a city. ” Laura Kriefman