Shifting Realities on Stage

School of Art Assistant Professor Freya Björg Olafson is the subject of recent media coverage connected to her award-winning performance work MÆ – Motion Aftereffect, presented this weekend by Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers.

In a feature published this week in the Winnipeg Free Press and a segment on CTV Winnipeg, Olafson reflects on how contemporary technologies shape perception, embodiment, and identity. The coverage situates MÆ – Motion Aftereffectwithin ongoing conversations around extended reality (XR)—including virtual and augmented reality—and the increasingly blurred boundaries between physical and digital experience.

First premiered in 2019, MÆ – Motion Aftereffect is a hybrid, intermedia performance that brings together choreography, live performance, motion capture, virtual environments, and projected imagery. Since its debut, the work has continued to evolve alongside rapidly changing technologies, embracing both technical advancement and moments of glitch, error, and visual fragmentation as meaningful aesthetic and conceptual tools.

The Free Press feature by Jen Zoratti highlights how the work explores the tension between embodiment and disembodiment—how bodies are translated into data, avatars, and traces over time—while remaining accessible to audiences without specialized knowledge of XR technologies. In conversation with the paper, Olafson notes that the work is intended to invite reflection on everyday relationships to screens, media, and mediated perception.

Olafson’s performance practice is closely connected to her research and teaching at the School of Art, where she works with students across digital media, video, performance, and interdisciplinary practices. Her work exemplifies how research-creation at the University of Manitoba engages contemporary social, technological, and cultural questions through experimental artistic forms.

MÆ – Motion Aftereffect is on stage in Winnipeg January 30–31 at 7:30 pm and February 1 at 4:00 pm, with an artist talk following the Sunday matinee. Tickets and performance details are available through Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers.

Read the full article below and find more media coverage here:

Shifting realities: Fragmentation of identities explored in updated work, Winnipeg Free Press

CTV Morning Live Winnipeg interview with Freya Björg Olafson [Video]