Bringing LuminAI to Life: Studying Dancers’ Perceptions of a Co-Creative AI in Dance Improvisation Class

The intersection of dance and artificial intelligence presents fertile ground for exploring human-machine interaction, co-creation, and embodied expression. This paper reports on a seven month four-phase collaboration with fifteen dancers from a university dance department, encompassing a preliminary study, redesign of LuminAI-a co-creative AI dance partner-, a contextual diary study, and a culminating public performance. Thematic analysis of responses revealed LuminAI’s impact on dancers’ perceptions, improvisational practices, and creative exploration. By blending human and AI interactions, LuminAI influenced dancers’ practices by pushing them to explore the unexpected, fostering deeper self-awareness, and enabling novel choreographic pathways. The experience reshaped their creative sub processes, enhancing their spatial awareness, movement vocabulary, and openness to experimentation. Our contributions underscore the potential of AI to not only augment dancers’ immediate improvisational capabilities but also to catalyze broader transformations in their creative processes, paving the way for future systems that inspire and amplify human creativity.