A disembodied voice echoes around the Hybrid Room of the Victorian College of the Arts, as a less inhibited attender of Company in Space's latest interactive performance, steps through a laser beam and triggers this sound file. Following her example, others reach out to intercept the narrow red rays which criss-cross the smoke filled space. Consequently a rush of language billows into the void created by the dancer, who has enigmatically disappeared underground. The audience are left to explore their mutating environment before she returns to gyrate in the "vortex"- a ring of laser triggers which choreograph a soundscape to mirror her movements. Throughout the event, audience movement activates video, animation and lighting cues. These develop obscure relationships between individuals, sub-groups, the absent or present performer and the shadowy computer operator in the corner.

Escape Velocity was an interactive performance installation, created without funding for Melbourne's annual Green Mill dance festival. Mostly it was an experiment; an opportunity for Company in Space Co-Directors, John McCormick and Hellen Sky, to test a germinal system in live performance and to trial its vitality in the cold daylight of the public installation.

Since 1992 the company have developed interactive tools which challenge the monopoly of the choreographer as performance maker. Their first interactive projects were extractive, empowering the dancers to navigate paths through a series of pre-programmed theatrical effects. Audiences were quickly brought in on the action, prompted to move their bodies intelligently as protagonists within the dance. Immersive environments were constructed, colliding physical with virtual bodies, as the company discovered remote networking systems and drifted graphically mutated artists and audiences across electronic space. Sharing the energy and enthusiasm of a generation of technophiles, Company in Space expansively embraced the theatrical potential of new technologies. Like many of their contemporaries, their recent performance history has been characterised by an exhilarating acceleration in the degree of sophisticated technology employed. This project however is a hiatus; it steps back and looks, with some confusion, amidst the techno-babble, for the body.

Inspired by Mark Dery's book of the same name, Escape Velocity created an artificial historic future to share his examination of, 'Cybercultures at the End of the Century'. Within a suspended moment, somewhere between the real and the virtual, the conscious and subconscious, it juxtaposed the nakedly physical moving body, the technologically mediated ideal body, the absent body and the disembodied emanations of the mind.

In contemporary dance the physical embodies meaning at the centre of a universe of emotional and spiritual depth. Yet in much of our experience, the body is little more than an encumbrance, as we strain our wrists on the mouse button and rub our Net-weary eyes. Proliferating text-based technologies weaken our muscles and atrophy our limbs; if we need a virtual body at all then it is going to be a fantastical, idealised one. There is no justification for World Wide Flab.

Whilst squarely confronting these issues, Escape Velocity remains adamantly movement-driven. It makes sense for physical theatre practitioners at the brink of the millennium to examine the future of fleshly communication. Self interest compels them to implicate audiences physically in experiences which generate complex gratifications, resistant to text. Each aspect of this project pivoted upon the physiological, uncomfortably accentuating the lumpen geographies of gristle and vein. The sluggish installation only stirred upon human contact. A suspended angelic figure, incandescent in graphic FX, soon came to earth in Blundstones. "Will the body flow away as a superfluous accessory?" asked a floating voice and someone sneezed a robust response. By implicating the audience physically in the oscillations of their debate, the company left them questioning their rational, emotional and footsore physical responses to experiences beyond the performance.

Just as art has always sought to express the ancient yearning to abandon the physical for spiritual, metaphysical planes, this project examined the future of fleshly communication in a world where technology might offer such escape. Ancient, timeless and futuristic, Escape Velocity illuminated with a momentary flash, a cross-section of human endeavour. Then the lights went up, audience faced artists and there were no perceptible global implications.