Lied Center and Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts Present Groundbreaking New Performance Experience

Step into the world of The Wilds - a new mixed reality performance experience where movement instantly becomes music as emerging technology allows dancers to create an immersive journey of sound, light, and visual media in real time. Part mythology, part utopian vision, The Wilds fuses live dancers with motion capture technology and real-time animation inspiring a profound bond of a shared, collective experience.

Produced through a partnership between the Lied Center for Performing Arts and the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, The Wilds is a collaborative work by acclaimed choreographer Laurel Jenkins, Grammy-nominated producer/composer Lewis Pesacov, and internationally recognized visual artist Jesse Fleming, founding director of the Awareness-Based Design Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. Machine learning collaboration was provided by Max Urbany, M.S. Data Science at Harvard University and Z by HP Global Data Science Ambassador.

The Wilds will be performed on October 6-15 in the Lied Center's Johnny Carson Theater. Tickets are available now at liedcenter.org, by phone at (402) 472-4747, and in person at the Lied Center box office.

Fleming says, "I think what we're seeing at this moment is this sort of acceleration of humanity into the virtual space. So we're working with the tension point of what does it mean to enter into a digital space, what does it mean to be in this body, this innate body of sensors, and what does it mean to mirror that outwardly. How does connection to each other and our unified belonging to earth exist at this time?"

Lied Center Executive Director Bill Stephan says, "The Lied Center has been a developer and supporter of new work for decades, and we consider it a vital part of our mission both as a leading national arts presenter and as part of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Since the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts opened its doors on the UNL campus in 2019, we've been working to find a meaningful way to collaborate, and when EMA Professor Jesse Fleming began sharing his work putting live dancers in a real-time mixed reality environment, we had found our project. Jesse then connected us with his talented collaborators and, under the leadership of EMA Founding Director Megan Elliot, The Wilds was born."

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