Dancing through Time is an interactive installation created to discover the Prix de Lausanne archive, a collection of dance performance recordings over fifty-one years. It consists of a 4k-touch screen mounted on a twelve meter rail, offering visitors the opportunity to walk through the fifty-one editions of the Prix de Lausanne dance competition.
Research Objectives
Dancing through Time was developed for the 50th anniversary of the Prix de Lausanne to make the competition’s audiovisual archive publicly accessible during the 2023 event. The installation was guided by five main research objectives:
- Showcasing the history of the Prix: To foreground the competition’s rich 50-year legacy, highlighting its chronological development, its international reach, and its diverse choreographic repertoire.
- Name-based access: To allow visitors to search for and locate individual dancers, reflecting the prominence of well-known alumni and the presence of returning former candidates among the audience.
- Public visibility: To attract and engage passers-by in the high-traffic exhibition space situated between the main dance studios.
- Ease of use: To ensure intuitive interaction that would remain accessible even without facilitation, lowering barriers for a broad audience.
- Embodied visualisations: To experiment with computational methods for surfacing the embodied knowledge of dance, by creating alternative visualisations that capture the temporal dynamics of performances.
Together, these objectives shaped an installation that not only celebrates the Prix’s archival heritage but also explores how computational and interactive techniques can renew access to dance as an embodied cultural form.
Description of the Installation
Dancing through Time was presented on the Linear Navigator (LN), a 4K touch screen mounted on a twelve-metre motorised rail. The LN was chosen for its ability to attract attention in the busy corridors of the Prix de Lausanne and for its suitability in supporting intuitive, physical navigation through the competition’s audiovisual archive. Visitors interact directly with the moving screen, which glides along the rail to bring different parts of the archive into focus.
The application, developed in Unity, offers visitors an immediate entry into fifty years of recorded performances. When approaching the installation, users first encounter a Main View: a horizontally scrolling set of thumbnails displaying fifteen performances at a time.
A central circular button opens a Navigation Menu with five browsing modes: Alphabetical, Year, Country, Performance, and About. These modes highlight different dimensions of the archive—its chronology, global reach, choreographic diversity, and the biographies of individual dancers.
To avoid confusion and ensure temporal coherence, the installation always maintains a chronological spatial arrangement along the twelve-metre rail. Regardless of browsing mode, the screen moves consistently along the timeline, giving visitors a clear sense of progression across decades. Once a performance is selected, the interface transitions to a Video View, where the chosen clip expands across the display.
In addition to the video itself and its metadata, the view offers four Motion Visualisations. These computational renderings, based on pose estimation and image processing, present alternative perspectives on the performance by highlighting temporal and spatial patterns in dancers’ movements.
To attract passers-by, an Idle Mode automatically activates when no interaction is detected, playing random performances to showcase the installation. This feature ensures the display remains lively and visible even without active use.
Overall, Dancing through Time supports two complementary modes of navigation:
- Global navigation, where visitors jump directly to a performance using the menu.
- Local navigation, where they browse continuously along the timeline, encountering performances serendipitously.
In both cases, the design foregrounds embodied engagement. Visitors navigate the archive through physical movement—walking with the screen as it glides along the rail—and through sensorimotor gestures on the touchscreen. The result is an open, exploratory encounter with the Prix de Lausanne’s archival heritage, one that highlights both its historical depth and its living connection to contemporary dance.
For detailed information on the installation and the result of our evaluation, please refer to our publication on Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3708548.
For additional information on the Motion Visualisations and the evaluation of their visitors’ reception, refer to our publication on the Proceedings of the AIUCD2025 conference: https://aiucd2025.dlls.univr.it/assets/pdf/papers/43.pdf.