Dancing with drones: World first flies onto the stage as Lucie in the Sky kicks off at Canberra Theatre Centre

Even with Lucie in the Sky - the Australasian Dance Collective performance at Canberra Theatre this weekend - which has six human and five drone characters, the answer is not what one would expect.

By using the Lucie micro drone designed by Swiss company Verity Studios, performers can safely dance in and around them without a safety net. But the size also means that they only have a maximum of three-minute battery life.

That means to create this 60-minute performance, it takes 48 drones. And while everything is programmed to make the same movements every single time, there are still moments when something unexpected happens with the technology.

"It's like this weird little crack in a doorway, to what could be the future of humans and IT and tech," dancer Lilly King said.

"I was talking to one of the other dancers and she was like, it's tricky trying to navigate this because we're so close, but they can change. And the next day, she came back and she was like, it's like we play a game with them every night because even though their pathways are set, and our pathways are set, we both have little mistakes."

The drones have already been used in several Cirque du Soleil performances, as well as concerts for Metallica, Justin Bieber, Drake and Celine Dion.

But while in those cases the drones were used to form, effectively, a light show, Australasian Dance Collective artistic director and choreographer Amy Hollingsworth set out to create a piece where the drones appeared to have human emotions for what is world first.

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"The fascinating, interesting, challenging and rewarding part about doing Lucie in the Sky is the fact that in working with drones, they have their limitations and so do we," dancer Harrison Elliott said.

"So the drones are all pre-programmed and the way that I like to look at it is thinking about it as a mix between puppetry and site-specific work.

"The site-specific component of it is the drones are all set in their pathways and very rarely - fingers crossed - deviate from those intended programmed pathways. And so you're working inside that parameter and that constraint.

"And then the puppetry side of it is the act of endowment of creating a context and giving something to this otherwise inanimate piece of plastic that's flying through the air, and give that a character personality and creating a relationship on stage."

Lucie in the Sky is one of the highlights of the inaugural Uncharted Territory festival, which ends on Sunday.

Since it began on July 7, it has brought together creative thinkers, innovators and artists to generate and present original, purposeful and progressive ideas.

"This show is a bit niche so it's cool to be amongst different communities," King said.

"We are so encapsulated inside this dance art community, usually, so it's so nice to be like welcomed into a different community we don't know very much about."

Lucie in the Sky is at the Canberra Theatre on Saturday. For tickets, go to canberrathearrecentre.com.au. Uncharted Territory is on until Sunday at various locations. Go to unchartedterritory.com.au.

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