Todo Nace Desde Lo Pequeño

Everything Starts Small

Festival Ollantay, El Martadero, Cochabamba, 19 September 2025

A live performance, 20 minutes, where Andean cosmology meets AI. Four dancers embody elemental spirits, Earth, Water, Wind and Jaguar, and move through states from seeds to digital networks. The AI answers a mythology we built together over seven weeks.

Dancers, generative imagery and spectators share one feedback loop: the movements of the performers are captured, transformed by generative AI and projected as a scenography that keeps changing.

We fine-tune a local AI model. Local means our own computers, our own energy, no internet. Our data. Our rules.

A dancer on a lit checkered floor in a dark hall, the audience in a ring, screens above.
Watch the whole performance, 19 minutes

Five states

The piece moves through ecological and cultural states, from the seed to a digital city.

  1. Seed and soil. The origin in the Pachamama. Sean is the tenacity of the Earth.
  2. Water and coast. Galgo is the memory of the ocean, the whale and the condor.
  3. Animal movement. Poower Lu is the jaguar, crossing between the human and the wild.
  4. Andean architecture. The stone knowledge of Tiwanaku. Textile geometry as code.
  5. Digital city. Lithium extraction, connectivity as a cage, the future we build on sacred ground.

The mythology behind the movement

Each dancer carries an elemental identity. Sean is Earth, with the energy of the serpent and the vicuña, the tenacity of the mountain in his weight. Galgo is Water, holding the memory of the ocean through the whale and the condor. Frikki Boy moves as Wind, the strength of a gorilla and the independence of a cat in one body. Poower Lu is the Jaguar: protector, transmuter, the one who crosses between worlds.

Every transformation, a dancer into a fish, into a textile pattern, into a digital interface, comes from this cosmology we built together. The AI responds to what is already there.

The mythology as a wheel, on CodePen

Seven weeks of co-creation

We worked with the system from the first day. In week one we mapped personal mythologies while we tested pose estimation. By week three we connected those stories to Andean cosmology, Tiwanaku, Titicaca, the Pachamama, and saw how a movement could call up a visual state. In weeks five and six we gave each dancer an element and an animal spirit, then trained the AI to recognise when someone embodied Earth, Water or Wind. By week seven the movement vocabulary and the visual answers happened together.

The mythology shaped the technology. The technology opened new paths in the mythology.

The machine answers

Speed, direction, closeness: the bodies of the dancers shape what unfolds around them, on three fabric screens. The dancers drive the images. Their bodies keep changing: glowing mushrooms, felines, primates, woven patterns, cybernetic avatars.

When the dancers see themselves change in real time, their movement changes too. You move, the machine interprets, you see yourself as something else, and you move differently because of it. Sean and Poower Lu spent weeks embodying the jaguar, and the AI learned to recognise when they called it forward.

The whole system runs offline and turns live video into images with almost no delay. No cloud.

The performance in photographs.
A dancer crawls on a checkered floor lit green, beside another dancer.
A screen shows a generated white jaguar lying on a checkered floor, above the silhouettes of the audience.
A generated face with a crown of light fills a screen above the audience.
A dancer in a red striped poncho, seen from behind, under red light.
A dancer in a bright yellow shirt and a beaded skirt moves under blue light.
Dancers on a magenta checkered floor, the audience close around them.
Dancers in woven blankets lie on the floor under a blue projection.
Dancers wrapped in red ponchos crouch on a yellow checkered floor.
A dancer on a lit checkered floor in a dark hall, the audience in a ring, screens above.
A person at the controls, in front of screens with the system's nodes.
A screen shows generated figures in glowing armour, red and blue, above the audience.
A dancer on the floor reaches up under magenta light.

Live camera into TouchDesigner · pose estimation with YOLOv8 · real-time video with StreamDiffusion · local Stable Diffusion · a performance interface of our own, with TouchDesigner CHOPs and OSC · OpenCV and SciPy for the analysis of movement

The team

  • Violeta Ayala, creative technology and visual direction. She writes instructions to the system live, adjusts weights and steers parameters, choreographing with the AI moment by moment.
  • Dan Fallshaw, camera, interface and music mix. He built the interface and operates the camera, framing and focusing as the piece unfolds.
  • Poower Lu, narrative, break dancer
  • Sean, choreography, break dancer
  • Galgo, choreography, break dancer
  • Frikki Boy, break dancer
  • Yasmeen Hitti, original music

How do our embodied ways of knowing, the things our bodies simply understand, survive when everything becomes data?

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