[Eng] Dance and Technology in East Asia: A Synoptic Review on Infrastructure, Research, and (Speculative) Pathways Across Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea

The conversation surrounding dance and technology in East Asia has intensified in recent years, prompted in part by Hong Kong’s policy emphasis on “Art Tech” and its rapid expansion of digital performance infrastructure. When we look more specifically at choreographic practice, we observe a growing exploration of sensor-triggered interactive systems, generative AI, motion capture, augmented and virtual reality, and other emerging tools that expand the vocabulary of movement and creation.

While Hong Kong’s developments may provide a useful entry point, the evolution of dance-technology in the region cannot be understood through the lens of any single city. This article draws on the vantage point of two institutions the author engages with closely—the Hong Kong Dance Alliance (HKDA) and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) —to open a wider dialogue with the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan, known for its research and development-driven methodologies, and the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company (KNCDC), one of the prominent examples of public-sector-supported production ecosystems. Together, these cases reveal shared structural constraints that limit long-term innovation across the region, despite the richness of expertise and infrastructure available. Viewed collectively, the three territories form a tapestry of strengths, gaps, and emerging opportunities that point toward the need for a more integrated regional value chain in dance-technology development.

This article does not claim to offer a comprehensive survey of the entire dance-technology landscape across Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea—such a study would require substantial further enquiry and a broader comparative framework. Instead, what follows arises from a moment of intersection: a convergence of peers, institutions, and practices in the author’s professional journey that reveals valuable lessons from success and failure, experimentation and discoveries.

YCAM Approach to Dance and Technology: Vision, Methodology, and Artistic Research

The YCAM occupies a unique position in Asia’s dance-technology landscape, distinguished by its long-term research and development ethos, civic orientation, and commitment to iterative experimentation. Its approach is rooted in the city’s historical trajectory: Yamaguchi was selected in the early 1980s as part of the national “Teletopia: Future Model Communication City” initiative, a policy that encouraged municipalities to explore new media and communication infrastructures as models for future living. As Yamaguchi embraced the identity of an “information and culture city,” the concept of a cultural facility centred on multimedia gradually took shape. When Arata Isozaki & Associates developed the basic design in the late 1990s, media art—then referred to as “information arts”—was deliberately placed at its core. Although the possibility of applying media art technologies to industry was also considered within the city,, the final vision was defined as cultivating the sensibilities of citizens and visitors through art and media. This has remained the philosophical anchor of YCAM’s work.

Within this context, YCAM’s approach to dance and technology distinguishes itself through a research and development-driven methodology uncommon in traditional performing arts institutions. Dance-tech projects at YCAM emerge through multiple pathways: an artist may present a small-scale work that later evolves into a full commission; an external proposal may spark collaboration; or YCAM itself may initiate a project by inviting an artist to work with a technology that the InterLab has identified as having potential for artistic and social exploration. In all cases, the relationship between choreography and technology is fluid. Sometimes an artist’s concept leads and InterLab prototypes the systems required to realise it; at other times a technological breakthrough prompts new artistic enquiries. In some cases, the emphasis shifts away from performance production toward the development of tools, such as systems that record dancers’ movements in real time and attach motion-responsive animations, as well as their open-source dissemination and application in areas like welfare. Such initiatives broaden the conceptual and technical scope of the field.

YCAM’s production model reinforces this exploratory mindset. Works typically unfold over approximately one to two years and are built through several short residencies in Yamaguchi, each lasting between five days and one week. These residencies function as iterative research cycles: The team establishes clear goals for each visit, evaluates the results, and refines or redefines their objectives for the next phase. This step-by-step evolution—from early prototyping to full implementation—allows both technology and choreography to develop in mutual response. It also acknowledges that discovery often requires time, uncertainty, and the willingness to revise assumptions.

A defining characteristic of YCAM’s process is its openness to the public. Throughout production, the centre organises backstage tours and work-in-progress presentations that invite citizens to witness and respond to unfinished stages of the work. This transparency enables artists and technologists to see their project from an external perspective and ensures that community feedback becomes an active component of the creative process. YCAM describes itself as a “site of experimentation”, deliberately naming its theatre, gallery spaces and film screening room as Studios A, B, and C to emphasise their function as laboratories rather than venues for polished presentation.

By providing an environment where artists are not required to “find the right answer immediately”, YCAM creates conditions conducive to genuine innovation. The centre’s long-term commitment to research, open collaboration, and civic dialogue has made it one of the most influential institutions in the evolution of dance and technology—an ecosystem where experimentation is not merely permitted but essential to artistic discovery.

Reflection from Korea National Contemporary Dance Company (KNCDC)

When KNCDC began designing the Dance X Technology Creative Lab in 2020, the South Korean performing arts field was still in the nascent stages of exploring collaboration with technology. Concepts such as artificial intelligence (AI), AR/VR, robotics, and motion capture were unfamiliar to most choreographers and dancers. Meanwhile, the technological landscape was evolving far more rapidly than the arts sector could follow. The post-COVID rise of the metaverse further underscored that understanding new technological conditions was becoming essential, not simply for innovation, but for the survival of performance practices.

For many artists, technology transcended its role from being a mere functional tool, appearing as a force fundamentally reshaping human, social, and ecological realities. Technology emerged as a crucial axis of enquiry for the future of performance. This realisation became the driving force behind KNCDC’s focus on Dance and Tech.

Initially, the Lab did not set out with a grand vision. Instead, the focus was on generating a meaningful outcome for the industry “expanding the realm of choreographic and dance creation through technology”. It was a phase of learning, experimentation, and testing possibilities for collaboration. The early objectives focused on helping participants to acquire new technological concepts, explore models of cooperation between technologists and artists, and develop small-scale works based on this knowledge. Although in 2022 two prototypes created by the first-year participants progressed into full production, nonetheless during the first two years (2021–2022), it became clear that while creation was possible, it required far more time. Failure comes as we explore. The Lab came to realise that tech-based dance creation requires sustained research, iterative experimentation, and a resilience to failure.

In 2023–2024, while maintaining the prototype-based approach, KNCDC expanded to include lectures and workshops, recognising that building discourse around dance and technology was equally crucial. The increased emphasis on small group discussions and research was also a reflection of the Lab’s evolving direction in the post-pandemic era. During this period, the Lab solidified its identity not as a production-driven programme but as a research-centred platform that expands creative thinking, methods, and vocabularies through technology. This remains one of its core functions and signature achievements.

Open Call for choreographers, technologists, producers to form Collective

A foundational principle of the Dance X Technology Creative Lab is the belief that before technology acts as a tool, it must first serve as an object of reflection, a subject to be critically examined and understood as an integral part of contemporary life shaped by technological systems. Through an open call, the Lab assembled choreographers envisioning boundary-crossing forms of dance, researchers and developers with high technological fluency, visual artists, and producers capable of mediating between these distinct worlds.

From its second year, the Lab introduced a thematic focus on "Posthumanism", inviting participants to explore the human body and the planet through both micro and macro perspectives. Workshops immersed participants in robotics, AI, virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR), and other emerging technologies. The four-week programme comprised two weeks of intensive lectures and workshops, followed by two weeks of team-based research labs where choreographers, technologists, and producers collectively generated questions and conducted experiments. This collaborative process became a practice of constructing "shared ground" among individuals possessing fundamentally different languages, perspectives, and methodologies. Ultimately, the priority was not the mere exchange of skills between choreographers and technologists, but the co-generation of questions that neither could have formulated alone.

Lab participants were then offered the opportunity through the following year’s open call to further develop their prototypes, deepening the enquiries initiated during the Lab. Eight prototypes developed by participants from 2021 through 2024 were publicly presented in October 2025. These works included explorations such as AI-perceived dance, audience-driven choreography using mixed reality, machines as performers, robotic choreography developed through cohabitation with a six-axis robotic arm, AI as a choreographic tool, sensory research using 3D-printed anatomical forms, and investigations into value systems and norms across virtual and physical worlds.

For choreographers whose primary medium is the human body, technology continues to feel unfamiliar and difficult to approach. Yet over the past five years participants have shown remarkable courage, willingly introducing fractures into their familiar worldviews and confronting new languages and unfamiliar terrains. The Dance X Technology Creative Lab has become a safe space for failure, a platform enabling encounters, collisions, and collaborations between dancers and technologists who inhabit different worlds, and a site where choreography expands beyond the human body to consider animals, plants, machines, and other nonhuman embodiments.

The Rise of Dance and Technology in Hong Kong

The development of dance and technology in Hong Kong has accelerated rapidly in the past decade, shaped by government policy, emerging cultural infrastructure, education-driven talent formation, and platforms that champion interdisciplinary experimentation. Together, these forces have created an ecosystem in which digital performance is not peripheral but increasingly central to the city’s artistic trajectory.

Policy has been one of the most significant catalysts. Since 2020, the Hong Kong Government has positioned Art Tech as a strategic focus for cultural development, linking it to innovation, creative industries, and Hong Kong’s international branding as an East-meets-West cultural hub. In response, a cross-bureau Task Force was formed, and a pool of HK$100 million was earmarked across existing funding schemes as seed support for arts-tech projects—including the Art Tech Support Scheme and enhanced Hong Kong Arts Development Council grants—which have encouraged institutions and independent artists to explore XR environments, algorithmic choreography, motion tracking, real-time engines, and immersive scenography.

As part of this new ecosystem, the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme (ACDFS) added an “Arts Technology” category to its 10th funding round — signalling that technology-enhanced arts proposals now receive dedicated institutional attention. Meanwhile, innovation-oriented funds such as the Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau’s Technology Voucher Programme (TVP) and the CreateSmart Initiative (CSI) welcomed arts-tech applications, widening the financial pathways beyond traditional arts funding.

A core infrastructure outcome is the East Kowloon Cultural Centre (EKCC). Designed from the ground up as a flagship “Arts Tech” venue, EKCC offers a dedicated “Lab” — a testbed studio with motion capture, real-time tracking, immersive projection, LED screens, and live-streaming capabilities — explicitly intended to support experimental and technology-rich performance works. Since 2021 EKCC has been cultivating the ecosystem: it launched the EKCC Academy for Arts Tech, offering short courses and, from 2024, a 24-month trainee programme to build a workforce adept in arts + tech.

The HKAPA, particularly through the School of Theatre and Entertainment Arts and the School of Dance, has emerged as a leading incubator for hybrid creatives. The Academy’s curriculum integrates projection design, interactive lighting, sound technologies and media scenography as well as spatial design. This has fostered a generation of graduates who approach choreography, dramaturgy, and performance through technologically literate lenses. Meanwhile, City University’s School of Creative Media (SCM) and other universities contribute technical depth, offering research in VR/AR, computational arts, machine learning, robotic design, and motion analysis. Collectively, these institutions form a vertically layered talent pipeline that feeds directly into Hong Kong’s expanding Art Tech workforce.

However, a vibrant dance-technology landscape requires not only talent and infrastructure but also platforms where experimentation is encouraged and presented. The HKDA has played a key role in this regard. Its initiatives—such as From Notion to Motion and the Creative Play Lab between Dance and Technology—have provided structured and mentored environments to create meetings of minds where choreographers, designers, technologists, and students collaborate to test new interpretations of movement via technological lenses. These programmes advance sector-wide literacy, offer safe spaces for trial and error, and connect with industry professionals, peers and institutional and industry partners.

Presentation platforms are equally important. The Hong Kong Arts Festival’s InnoArt Series, Tai Kwun’s SPOTLIGHT, the Hong Kong Government’s Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival (now Asia+ Festival) and the West Kowloon Cultural District’s Freespace Dance Season have become some of Hong Kong’s most active stages for digital performance, offering a curated environment for multimedia dance works that incorporate projection, interactive sound, real-time media, and immersive scenography.

Taken together, these developments reveal an ecosystem that is gradually taking shape: policy enabled infrastructure, institutions focusing on grooming talent, and platforms fostering creation and presentation.

Misalignment and missed opportunities in Hong Kong

Alongside these positive developments, the dance sector continues to experience a number of practical limitations that shape how technology is adopted and developed in Hong Kong. While policy support and new infrastructure have expanded opportunities, technology literacy among dance practitioners remains uneven. Most choreographers encounter digital tools only within specific project contexts, leaving limited time or resources for sustained skill-building. As a result, technology often becomes an applied production element rather than an ongoing area of artistic exploration.

At the same time, creative technologists in Hong Kong are largely oriented toward commercial and client-driven work, including immersive installations, projection mapping and mechanical displays. Their availability for longer-term artistic collaboration is therefore constrained, and engagements with dance often occur within short project timelines rather than through iterative co-development.

These conditions are reinforced by Hong Kong’s project-based funding structure, which continues—despite the Art Tech policy—to prioritise performance-ready outcomes over research, prototyping, and experimentation. The high cost of pre-production, motion capture, testing environments, and interdisciplinary labour further limits the feasibility of extended research cycles. Presenters and producers must also balance innovation with financial sustainability, often leading to an emphasis on polished, market-appealing work.

Shared Constraint Across the Region: Project Cycles Over Research Cycles

Despite different institutional strengths, the underlying issue across Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea is similar: the dominance of short project cycles over long-term research cycles, leading to pain points such as:

● inconsistent technology literacy in dance communities

● limited availability of technologists for artistic R&D

● difficulty sustaining prototypes beyond initial showing through the production chain

● pressure to deliver polished outcomes prematurely

● a lack of frameworks to refine and evolve ideas through multiple stages.

The region has infrastructure, talent, and political attention but lacks a value chain that links research, development, production, and presentation in a sustained arc. To put this into the context of Research and Development for a new product for the market; the cycle of Dance and Technology innovation is experiencing a lack of momentum because of these short project cycles.

A Speculative Way Forward - Modulise Regional Value Chain:

Hong Kong → Japan → South Korea → Hong Kong

While it is often assumed that governments should play a leading role in driving arts-and-technology initiatives and innovation, the author’s experience suggests that policy and institutions tend to operate in a more reactive manner. Alignment and synergy are more likely to occur once tangible use cases—such as working prototypes or demonstrable artistic outcomes—have already emerged. In this context, the author proposes a speculative way forward that reimagines the dance tech production chain itself. Rather than attempting to realign multiple policy bodies and institutions from the outset—a process that is typically lengthy and subject to numerous uncertainties—an alternative approach would be to sustain a practice-led experimentation cycle (long enough) for policy, institutions, and the artistic community to converge organically.

This approach is further informed by an emerging, albeit yet-to-be-proven, observation shared across Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea: audiences, markets, and industries in each region exhibit markedly different appetites for risk in arts-and-technology ventures. Hong Kong, in particular, tends to demonstrate a lower tolerance for artistic risk, often favouring show-ready outcomes within shorter cycles. By contrast, environments with dedicated, technology-oriented spaces such as the YCAM, or public-sector-supported institutions like the KNCDC, appear to operate within ecosystems that allow greater room for experimentation, longer development horizons, and stronger institutional trust in the artistic value chain. These differences suggest that no single city can optimally support every stage of dance-technology development.

A pragmatic workaround lies in focusing on institutions’ existing mandates, particularly their capacity to support international co-productions, artist-in-residency programmes, and laboratory-based research. By strategically coupling these frameworks, resources can be aligned around a shared set of projects and developed through a coherent three-year cycle. Such an approach shifts the emphasis from policy-led coordination to practice-led momentum, allowing artists, technologists, and institutions to collaborate iteratively while policy alignment follows in response to demonstrated value. The following section outlines how a multi-city development cycle could leverage the complementary strengths of the Hong Kong, Japanese, and South Korean ecosystems to support sustained innovation in dance and technology.

Phase 1: Seeding and Early Exploration (Hong Kong)

A regional development cycle could begin with Hong Kong as the catalyst for early experimentation. Under the coordination of the HKDA, a creative-matching platform—potentially delivered through an international virtual residency—would pair dance makers with technologists and initiate first-round ideation. These early concepts would be incubated across two key local infrastructures:

● HKAPA’s TechBox, supporting small-scale prototyping and research-driven exploration; and

● EKCC’s Lab, offering work-in-progress showings and access to specialised equipment under managed, entry-level budgets.

This stage aims to identify emerging creative teams, refine conceptual directions, and produce a “basket” of five or six early-stage projects ready for deeper investigation.

Phase 2: Intensive Research Residency (YCAM, Japan)

The next phase would further propel selected teams to the YCAM for a concentrated period of research residency, where the facilities are supported by YCAM’s dramaturgs, technicians, and producers, to undergo a process of:

● methodological refinement,

● technical and systems consolidation,

● conceptual strengthening, and

● participatory testing through public work-in-progress showings.

Through this rigorous process, YCAM would help distill the initial basket into two or three viable prototypes with clear artistic and technical trajectories.

Phase 3: Production Development (KNCDC, South Korea)

Prototypes demonstrating strong potential would then enter a production-development phase, incorporated into the regular season for a black-box scaled Dance Tech Open Week with collaboration with artistic personnel and dancers from the KNCDC. Drawing on the momentum of Art-Tech initiative across public sectors, such as the Art Korea Lab, exposure to dramaturgy, and creative meetings with professionals, technologists, and peers in the community would enable the projects and engaged artists to grow exponentially and also mature to an early stage of form appropriate for international tour or co-producing probing purpose. The Korean stage of the cycle effectively transforms research outputs into tour-ready cultural products.

Phase 4: Presentation and Circulation (Hong Kong + Regional Markets)

The final phase brings the completed works back to Hong Kong for premiere presentations within major festival platforms such as the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Asia+ Festival, and Freespace Dance Season. Following their Hong Kong debuts, the works would enter broader Asian touring circuits, including PAMS (Seoul) and YPAM/TPAM (Japan), as well as international mobility networks.

Together, these four phases constitute a three-year regional value chain—one that no single city could sustain independently, but which becomes achievable through coordinated collaboration across Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. This model not only supports artistic innovation but also establishes a structural pathway from research to production to circulation, strengthening the long-term vitality of dance-technology in East Asia.

Beyond Performance: Expanding Dance Tech into Research, Data Science, and Cultural AI

Alongside performance-led innovation, an important strand of dance-technology development is emerging in non-performance-based research and development. In this domain, technologies are explored not primarily for stage presentation, but for their capacity to support the long-term wellbeing of performers, reimagine creative processes and production methodologies, and strengthen the conservation and accessibility of cultural heritage for future generations.

● Dance Science:

Technologies applied in movement analysis and growth cycle are applied to questions of health, rehabilitation, injury prevention, and career longevity. This supports more sustainable practices for performers while generating data-informed insights that can feed back into training and choreography.

● Biometric Data as Creative Insight:

Motion capture, muscle activation, and breathing analysis can provide choreographers and educators with new ways of understanding dancers’ embodied knowledge. Such data-driven perspectives can enhance artistic dialogue, particularly in short-term or cross-cultural creative exchanges.

● AI-Driven Cultural Archives:

Training AI systems to recognise micro-gestures, rhythmic patterns, and symbolic movements specific to East Asian dance traditions, researchers can build digital repositories that preserve intangible cultural heritage at a granular level. Importantly, this approach also addresses the dominance of Western-biased datasets in current AI systems, asserting the significance of Asian movement vocabularies within future learning and creative technologies.

Conclusion

Hong Kong’s recent initiatives have helped initiate a broader conversation on dance and technology in East Asia, yet the region’s true potential lies in recognising and mobilising its complementary strengths. Japan contributes depth in research and experimentation, South Korea offers robust production capabilities and art tech infrastructures, while Hong Kong provides platform, market and expanding cultural facilities. Individually, these assets are significant; collectively, they form the basis of a more sustainable and resilient ecosystem.

The next phase of development requires aligning these strengths into a cyclical, cross-regional value chain that supports the full life cycle of innovation—from early inquiry and laboratory research to production, presentation, and circulation. By fostering multi-year development pathways, strengthening international collaboration, and investing not only in performance outcomes but also in non-performance-based research, East Asia can move beyond fragmented project cycles toward long-term artistic and technological growth.

Such an approach positions dance-technology not merely as a tool for novelty, but as a shared regional practice grounded in research, cultural specificity, and collective vision.

Reference

https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr20-21/english/panels/ha/papers/ha20210510cb4-944-3-e.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

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This article is authored by Ian WY Leung and co-authored by Jisun Park, Ahram Gwak and Akiko Takeshita. It has drawn reference from the discussion at the Dance Technology Open Week Forum hosted by Korea National Contemporary Dance Company (represented by Sung Yong Kim) and moderated by Kyu Choi, Artistic Director of the Seoul Performing Arts Festival on 25 October 2025.