A collaboration between the University of Iowa College of Engineering and the Dance Program opens up a world of potential projects. But, for the 2024 Dance Gala: Agile, the result was something no one expected.

Stephanie Miracle, assistant professor and choreographer in the Department of Dance, worked with Deema Totah, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, to create multiple robots to perform with dance students in a series of performances at the gala.

“I’ve been doing some research on our relationship with objects and things we think of as inanimate,” Miracle said. “I came up with this idea of wanting to work with a robotics engineer. We started working over the summer, and it just blossomed into a really dynamic reciprocal collaboration.”

Miracle, who has previously worked with animation and digital media, wanted to explore the constant wave of new technological advancements in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence.

“This piece is a series of shorter works of music that is very human and traditional,” Miracle said. “I wanted to combine that music with these small robots dancing with humans on a stage. The piece is playful. It’s quite funny at times, and it uses the movements of the dancers, and the robots are in dialogue with each other.”

The partnership with the College of Engineering and the Robotics and Assistive Devices Lab, run by Totah, allowed the dancers to work with engineers and gain a better understanding of another discipline.

“This was such a great example of interdisciplinary research where we were really informing each other’s practices,” Miracle said. “It was just so satisfying to see the teams come together and create this piece.”

Jinann Abudagga, an Iowa City West High School senior, started on this project as a summer intern in the Robotics and Assistive Devices Lab. She was later brought on as an official consultant, designer, and coder for the robots in this project.

“I got a lot of creative liberty with this project,” Abudagga said. “And this was the first robotics project that I’ve worked on alone or for the most part. It was really fun for me to implement my ideas without having to go through someone or through other teammates.”

Abudagga’s experience on the robotics team at her high school helped prepare her for this opportunity, but she never could have expected the possibilities that this project would bring for her and the new techniques it would teach her.

“I learned through my robotics mindset. I know a lot about movement because I need to make a robot move,” Abudagga said. “But I never thought about, for example, I can make [a] robot turn with a motor, but dancers do the same thing with their bodies.”

With a budget of $500 for seven robots and only five months to design and create them, Abudagga was on a time and money crunch for this project. She worked to not only make the robots collaborate with the dancers, but to also make them visually appealing on stage.

“As a roboticist, visual things are the last thing I think about,” Abudagga said. “But when robots need to perform on stage, visual aesthetics are really important, and I’ve never done that before. They obviously need to move more than they need to look nice, but I needed to factor in appearances, in addition to mobility.”

Abudagga learned more about the fundamentals of movement, which she will bring back with her to her robotics team and her future career goals. The summer internship and this experience with the UI helped her learn more that will help her as an engineering student in college.

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“I’ve learned so much about movement and dance that I didn’t know about earlier, and I think what I learned from the dancers is then going to help me be a better roboticist, be a better engineer,” Abudagga said. “When you collaborate with people with a different world perspective, it really improves your own way of thinking.”

Maddison Bulman, a fourth-year dance BFA on the pre-physical therapy track at the UI, performed in Dance Gala: Agile. Her training for the auditions began last April and ended with the performance in October. Throughout her rehearsals, the dancers grew close with the engineers, who attended every practice.

“I liked that we got to become so close with the engineers,” Bulman said. “They were at every rehearsal, constantly tinkering and fixing, alternating their pathways based on how we’re coming in with the choreography and traversing the space. It was more than collaborative work. It felt like it became our little family.”

It was an adjustment for Bulman and the other dancers to adjust to the robots, she said. Dancing with the robot was like dancing with another person, Bulman said. Sometimes she would forget they were in the space.

“It was hard getting to know how the robot moved and then integrating that into our bodies,” Bulman said. “My robot resembled a snake, and it was like a work of art. It’s hard to transfer the movements from the robot onto myself in the space and remember that it was there, too.”

The undergraduates and graduate dancers, working with the engineers at the College of Engineering and with Abudagga, had an excellent experience that was both educational and artistic, Bulman said.