Juilliard's Center for Creative Technology Begins Inaugural Future Stages Festival

Juilliard’s Center for Creative Technology (CCT) will host the Future Stages Festival from March 21 to 28—a series of performances exhibiting innovative applications of technology to the performing arts. This inaugural festival marks the 25th anniversary of the center’s first full performance and includes four public performances with a lineup that engages cutting-edge technological innovations within music, dance, and drama.
 
On March 21, the Future Stages Festival will begin with Our Future Voices: Music and Technology of the Americas—a collaboration with Juilliard’s The New Series and Carnegie Hall’s Nuestros Sonidos festival. The program features compositions by Tania León (who received an honorary doctorate from Juilliard in 2024), Angelica Negrón, Juilliard alum Vivian Fung, and Pre-College composition faculty member Alyssa Weinberg. Performed by Juilliard music students, the concert will include live integration of digitally created video projections that are synced to the movement of the musicians onstage. Before the performance, David Ludwig, the dean and director of the Music Division and chair of the composition department, will lead a preconcert conversation.

The festival continues with three additional programs:

Music and Emerging Technologies (March 22): A performance highlighting original works by Juilliard composition students in a concert of electronic and electroacoustic music. The composers worked with computer software to create and mix their pieces, adding a new layer into the composition process. 

The Space Between Us (March 27): A performance presenting new and experimental works by music, dance, and drama alums, including Maggie Scrantom (Group 52) and Marla Phelan (BFA ’09, dance) and Alexander J. Jones (BFA ’15, dance). Each piece features performers creating and interacting with digital content including video, animation, motion-capture design, music, and sound, and were created using technological programs such as IRCAM’s RAVE (Audio Variational Autoencoder), the MUGIC motion sensor, Perception Neuron 3 motion capture system, the cutting-edge rendering software Unreal Engine, and the real-time effects and immersive video mapping processor Resolume Arena. 

Convergence/Celebration of 25 Years of Technology in Performance at Juilliard (March 28): An immersive, ambisonic concert featuring compositions by alumni of Juilliard’s music technology program. This event highlights the connection between cutting-edge technology and the performing arts, a core focus of CCT. Convergence honors the coming together of alumni from various departments who have collaborated with the center since 2001. Convergence also showcases the use of AI as a visual design tool, enhancing the performance atmosphere with dynamic digital projections.