Laura Kriefman wants synchronised cranes to dance over London

Laura Kriefman is more than a choreographer. "My company, The Guerilla Dance Project, specialises in fusing movement and technology," says Bristol-based Kriefman, 32. Her studio works on installations and massive spectacles with a singular aim: helping us to reconnect with our bodies and our environment. "We've got so many labour-saving devices around these days that our sense of movement in our bodies have completely changed. And so we're interested in looking at how we can use the technology to change the way we see the world, and liberate our sense of movement again."

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Take Hidden Fields, for which Kriefman collaborated with scientists to help fuse an interactive dance space with quantum mechanics, or Kicking The Mic, which used sensors to turn a dance floor into a MIDI instrument for tap dancers. "We made a fully wireless looper and sampler, so the tap dancer can pick and choose between being a flute or a cello -- you name it," she says. "It was a really interesting exploration: are you composing choreography? Or are you choreographing a composition?"

Kriefman's other pieces transform public spaces: such as Rolling Stones, an array of interactive music sculptures. "It's about giving people back possession of their instinctive feelings of how they want to move and interact in their public spaces," says Kriefman.

For her The Space/WIRED Creative Fellowship project, Kriefman is taking her interaction with public spaces to a new scale. Crane Dance, she explains, will be "a synchronised dance routine across the entirety of a city skyline, set to music, using all the industrial construction cranes". "The way they move is just exquisite," she says.

The plan is to hold Crane Dance in London in spring 2016; a rehearsal is planned in Bristol this October. "Cranes really demonstrate our disconnection from our cities: they're things happening behind hoardings, over holes in the ground we can't see," she says.

"I'm hoping that people will be able to watch it from their favourite point in the city: going up on to their roofs, looking out the window, seeing the duets and trioses between cranes on the same site, then synchronised movements, where it's the same shape across the whole of the city." "It's about creating this really positive memory, and absolute spectacle, that for a moment gives the city back to its citizens." "Winning the Fellowship is an amazing validation in the work we're trying to do," she says. "And the best part is: I get to drive a construction crane."http://www.helliontrace.com/

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK