Ginger Krebs (center) with dancers in “Protected by Invisible Fence” at the Museum of Contemporary Art September 18-20 as part of the Chicago Performs festival/Photo: Riley Wadzinski

This story appears in our 2026 Fall Arts preview, featured in our September issue.

If you can remember a time before you walked through life with a networked computer in your pocket tracking your every move and conversation, have you ever considered the ways this little device influences your thoughts? Even your movements, your gestures? Choreographer Ginger Krebs thinks about it a lot. Krebs is fascinated by our relationship to technology and uses dance to explore surveillance and dystopian systems of power with tenderness and offbeat humor. In her 2022 “All We Can See from Here,” Krebs flew a drone with a camera over the small audience in the Steppenwolf 1700 theater before it was joined by a quartet of dancers, whose kaleidoscopic movements it captured and projected from above. The performance was at turns stunning, awkward, chilling and funny—often all at once.

For the last few years, Krebs and composer Joseph Kramer (one half of the experimental music duo Coppice) have been developing a performance in which dancers interact with crowd-control stanchions outfitted with microphones and motion and touch sensors, and the stanchions interact with them. An early iteration took place in the gymnasium on the fourth floor of the Chicago Athletic Association hotel. A year later, Krebs shared another work in progress as part of a residency at the Chicago Cultural Center. The final piece, wryly entitled “Protected by Invisible Fence,” premieres at the Museum of Contemporary Art September 18-20 as part of the Chicago Performs festival. I spoke with Krebs and Kramer about the development of the piece and how live performance reveals the currents of the water we swim in.

Dancers in “Protected by Invisible Fence” at the Museum of Contemporary Art September 18-20 as part of the Chicago Performs festival/Photo: Riley Wadzinski

What makes you interested in surveillance as a topic to explore through dance?

Krebs: This is weirdly autobiographical and not in the front of my mind as I make this. I think it has to do with being an identical twin. People are fascinated with you in this way where I feel like I’m being inspected. The difference in my early life between how close I felt to my sister—even the idea of turn-taking in conversation felt so courtly and formal. I didn’t need to do that with my sister at all—I didn’t even need to say the thing. This early connection with her—which is very bodily and tactile—versus being inspected by people who are fascinated by what you look like.

Dance and gesture are so interesting to me. When people are not trying to convey who they are—when they’re not performing—and just dealing with the basic indignities and awkwardness of living life in a body, people’s gestures show you something really lovable and human. It’s troubling to me as surveillance infiltrates our lives more broadly and deeply, the way people are having to develop defense mechanisms. Boundaries are not being respected. The soft quality people have when they’re relaxed and willing to show something about who they are, that’s one of the most beautiful things about people.

The invasiveness of surveillance is troubling to me, but it’s also really interesting how it affects our need to perform ourselves and our “brand identity.” When we have no privacy, I think it affects the ability to think at all.

Was that your jumping-off point for this performance?

Krebs: That was a key theme from the start. Another explicit goal from the beginning of this thing is that it was not going to have any projected images or God-like, outside eye that is a locus of power. I’m so interested in themes of power and their impact on soft, fleshy bodies, and the extent to which power hides. I think of the figure of Mussolini: you could point to that guy with his puffy chest and say, “Dictator, there.” More and more you can’t point to anyone—you can’t even talk to a person! It’s kind of about bureaucracy. The idea is there must be a network operating where you can’t point to a singular thing and say the source of the problem is here and be okay with it, because you could get outside of it and understand how the dynamics are working. The power is a verb: an action, not a thing. It’s un-localizable.

I emphatically did not want the technology to be decorative. I didn’t want the piece to look techy and neat-o. My understanding of the technology is so partial compared to Joseph, but I was trying to understand how it worked and develop choreography that was sometimes modeled after it and sometimes built to work with it. It led to a long research period where I made some excruciatingly boring choreography.

Kramer: It’s great to hear you talk about this. It took a lot of developing what [the stanchions] could do through toy models and how human performers affect the sensing. The technology in the box grew quite a bit so they could talk to each other and learn how to coordinate.

What does it mean that the boxes learned how to coordinate?

Kramer: They are connected through a network of radios. They’re able to run algorithms that coordinate based on timings of the things they sense. That was not originally a feature, but we needed it.

Why stanchions?

Krebs: The Chicago Athletic Association had ridiculously high-end stanchions. They were beautiful! I don’t know if they were old-growth wood or just looked like it. Just as sculptures, I was so taken with them.

Rehearsing in the Chicago Athletic Association, the only thing I could think about was class dynamics, in an almost cartoony way from another era. We were in that gym, and there’s a kitchen off it. I would be in there rehearsing and people would be wheeling steaming food through. The workers would communicate via walkie-talkie. The labor, the world of the people waiting on the people staying at the hotel—that’s what I was really taking in.

Stanchions are like the perfect object of ideology. They have no inherent meaning of their own. Any person can plunk them down anywhere and they’re supposed to have authority. We don’t know whose authority, but the authority is bolstered by dressing up as a high-class thing in chrome and velvet. I was looking at ways you can arrange them in queues at banks. And then there’s the VIP velvet ropes. As an object signifying bureaucracy you don’t get better than that.

Dancers in “Protected by Invisible Fence” at the Museum of Contemporary Art September 18-20 as part of the Chicago Performs festival/Photo: Riley Wadzinski

I’m always amazed at stanchion management in airport security lines. How the staff know how to connect and detach them to change the line length and how that will change the way people are herded through. In the title you use the term “protected by.” Why protect?

Krebs: I’m interested in a complicated read of that word. It’s a sign people put in the windows of their homes if they have a home security system. It’s an invisible fence, so supposedly it’s not there, but then you make a sign to advertise it’s there. The doubleness of that: it’s a threat and a notion of protection. Implicit is that some violence would befall the person crossing the fence. It seems like home security systems are multiplying. There’s more footage of people’s mundane spaces. I think it’s about the proclamation: the hiding and showing.

In your project description you quote philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s concept of “smart power.”

Krebs: The nugget that’s interesting to me is that control isn’t exercised repressively. Instead, it’s used seductively. The idea “I can express myself by clicking ‘like’ and show something of who I am.”

This is going to sound like I’m anti-technology, but as human beings we’re optimizing ourselves and making little corporations of ourselves and maximizing our productivity. We’re doing to ourselves the kinds of things that in earlier generations would have sparked unionizing in the workplace. It’s concerning to me that we become complicit in our own exploitation.

Tell me how you take this to the stage with your collaborators. How many performers are in the piece?

Krebs: There are eight dancers and eight stanchions.

Not a fair fight.

Krebs: There are a lot of different ways the humans and stanchions interact. Some are modeled after how Alexa and ChatGPT flatter human beings. Again, it’s a pet-like reflecting-back. There are modes where the stanchions are beautiful: the sound they create is beautiful in an uplifting way.

Kramer: It feels like triumph, when you and the stanchion and your people are doing the right thing, they give you a boost.

Krebs: There are lots of times when the stanchions are more authoritarian, often in terms of timing. Are you allowed to progress or do you have to wait? A bunch of the choreography is set up so performers have to wait for certain sounds to go left or right. There’s a section where, after having established that the stanchions are calling the shots, they call out a number, and the performer has to come to the stanchion and tap the top to stop it. And—Joseph, I’m not doubting your amazing skill—they will malfunction.

Kramer: Oh yeah.

Krebs: Error sounds will happen. At every rehearsal, performers wind up looking at the things and wondering what they should do.

Kramer: Right now, the stanchions have twenty different modes, and it grows all the time, which is why the dancers are always looking to see if they’re doing the right thing. They can whistle your note back to you. They can tell you how far away you are. One thing that was really important from the beginning is, whatever technology they had would have real stakes on what the dancers do. So what would motivate people to obey them? Sometimes they are delightful, to reward what the dancers do.

Krebs: At one point I was trying to learn more about workplace culture in Amazon fulfillment centers. They have mandatory fun. The workers are forced to go to team meetings where a team member relays a success story or sings a song.

Harlan Rosen, Christina Chammas, Yuxuan Zhong, Stephanie Stoumbelis, Eunjin Choi, Kenny Ward and Lauren Kunath in “Protected by Invisible Fence” at the Museum of Contemporary Art September 18-20 as part of the Chicago Performs festival/Photo: Riley Wadzinski

Oh god.

Krebs: That repressiveness but making it look “fun” is so upsetting.

How much of the performance, dictated by the stanchions, is random?

Kramer: There are quite a few moments where you know if you approach a stanchion something will happen, but you don’t know what it will be.

Krebs: It’s sort of relative. I’m thinking of Annie Dorsen and algorithmic theater. The idea is in place and it sort of unfolds. For better or worse, I really care about the dynamism of the performance event itself, which calls for more shaping of individual sections. Some of the choreography captures something true about living in relationship with these objects, and that’s set choreography. There are sections where the performers know a lot about what is going to happen but there are variables up in the air.

What else would you like to say?

Kramer: There is music in the piece. There are some generative compositions [from the stanchions] created by the choreography and how the dancers perform it. It will be different every night.

Krebs: We did an iteration I kind of love but it’s high-stakes because you don’t want to piss off your audience right at the start. At the work-in-progress showing at the Cultural Center, the way people came to their seats was through a configuration of fifteen stanchions with ropes. There were basically eight holding pens and six people at a time were led through them—in case people came to the show without a fresh experience of pointless bureaucracy.

It’s riding this fine line I’m really interested in. I was looking at footage of the faces of everyone. Everyone is uncomfortable. The performers are uncomfortable. The audience members are uncomfortable in a way that’s so on point. It totally points to the exact thing the piece talks about which is, “I’m very uncomfortable because I’m being seen in this moment.” We’re looking for ways to make this interesting and remind people they live this every day, but without torturing anyone.

Something I’m really pleased with—the performers are phenomenal. We had a short residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. In our time there, it was very human what they showed. This whole thing about how being surveilled changes how one acts and thinks. Performance is quintessentially this, but the performers are willing to go to a place where you feel like you’re getting this gift. It’s why I would think anyone would go to performance: to see another person. This is a bias, but sometimes when someone really wants you to see them…

You want to look away.

Krebs: Yes, so allowing themselves to be seen, and be kind of porous. It’s deeply touching. It’s not like you can make art that’s an antidote to the problem the piece is asking questions about, but if there is something hopeful in this mix it’s those human beings showing themselves in this soft quality. I’m happy that that seems to be happening. And it’s funny!

Published in the print edition of the September 2026 issue.