Julie C. Stamm
Julie C. Stamm
Julie C. Stamm

Horrorscope

~ 15 min Participatory Performance
Shift Festival at Royal Ballet Opera in London, 2026 
Saalbaubesetzung Witten as a lecture performance, 2026

Julie C. Stamm

Horrorscope is a participatory performance game for busy public spaces, stages, and transitional sites. In groups of six, participants each receive a map containing a spatial pathway. When walked together, these six individual routes form a collective choreography.

Julie C. Stamm
Julie C. Stamm

The maps are derived from predictive models of sea level rise, imagining how the borders of the Thames in London may have shifted by 2100. The choreographic score overlays the river’s present and possible future edges, allowing participants to experience climate change not as an abstract projection, but through spatial relation, coordination, and shared movement.

Julie C. Stamm
Julie C. Stamm

Across six maps, each representing a part of London, Horrorscope forms a speculative atlas of a future city shaped by water. The work plays with prediction, uncertainty, climate models, and the human urge to gather, orient, and move together in the face of unstable futures.

Julie C. Stamm

Developed in the context of CCL@Royal Ballet and Opera, the work draws on conversations with a choreologist and research into historic ballet scores notated in Benesh Movement Notation. Starting positions and formations of the corps de ballet from older choreographies became part of the spatial logic of the piece. The starting positions were generated by an algorythm taking into account the rules of ballet formations such as symmetry and triangulations. 

Julie C. Stamm

Research and Sidequest

This work builds on Tunnel Bingo, continuing an interest in social choreographic games, mapped movement, and the politics embedded in spatial data. During the research phase at the Royal Ballet and Opera, I looked into public responses to sea level predictions and the Thames Estuary 2100 project, which proposes long-term flood management strategies for London and the Thames. 

Alongside the walking score, I developed a small offer for decompression/relief. Participants were invited to draw a face directly onto a map of the river and its predicted future borders, expressing an opinion, reaction, or emotional residue from the score.

Each detected face further intensified a soundscape composed from fictionalized opinion archetypes based on online debates around the Thames Estuary project. Using text-to-speech and generated background music, the voices were arranged in TouchDesigner as an audio feed that mimics the rhythm of scrolling through social media feeds.

~ 15 min Participatory Performance
Shift Festival at Royal Ballet Opera in London, 2026 
Saalbaubesetzung Witten as a lecture performance, 2026

Horrorscope is a participatory performance game for busy public spaces, stages, and transitional sites. In groups of six, participants each receive a map containing a spatial pathway. When walked together, these six individual routes form a collective choreography.

Developed in the context of CCL@Royal Ballet and Opera, the work draws on conversations with a choreologist and research into historic ballet scores notated in Benesh Movement Notation. Starting positions and formations of the corps de ballet from older choreographies became part of the spatial logic of the piece. The starting positions were generated by an algorythm taking into account the rules of ballet formations such as symmetry and triangulations. 

Research and Sidequest

This work builds on Tunnel Bingo, continuing an interest in social choreographic games, mapped movement, and the politics embedded in spatial data. During the research phase at the Royal Ballet and Opera, I looked into public responses to sea level predictions and the Thames Estuary 2100 project, which proposes long-term flood management strategies for London and the Thames. 

Alongside the walking score, I developed a small offer for decompression/relief. Participants were invited to draw a face directly onto a map of the river and its predicted future borders, expressing an opinion, reaction, or emotional residue from the score.

Each detected face further intensified a soundscape composed from fictionalized opinion archetypes based on online debates around the Thames Estuary project. Using text-to-speech and generated background music, the voices were arranged in TouchDesigner as an audio feed that mimics the rhythm of scrolling through social media feeds.

Julie C. Stamm