Throughout the history of dance, great choreographers have always had their muses. Marius Petipa had Pierina Legnani, Frederick Ashton had Margot Fonteyn, and George Balanchine had Tanaquil Le Clercq. For Wayne McGregor, however, his most enduring muse is technology. From early works like Aeon (2000), which explored the nascent possibilities of online livestreaming, to Autobiography (2017), where he fed his own genetic code into an algorithm, McGregor’s pas de deux with tech has led him to be the choreographer most committed to pushing the boundaries of what dance can be. He continually questions where the form can go once we start thinking outside of the flesh-and-blood body.

His latest work, On The Other Earth, which premiered at the Venice Dance Biennale and will show as part of McGregor’s upcoming Somerset House retrospective, Infinite Bodies, places the audience at the heart of a curved 3D screen, immersing them in a 360-degree panorama where the dance unfolds all around. Offering the viewer an experience that is entirely their own, there is no single point of view. Two people, depending on where they’re standing, could have two entirely different experiences. Created in collaboration with the pioneering new media artist Professor Jeffrey Shaw, who developed the technology behind it, the piece is a bold foray into a post-cinematic landscape. One where narrative is left in the hands of the viewer and where the audience/dancer relationship is entirely broken down.

Barry Pierce: Wayne, where does On The Other Earth fit into your wider body of work?
Wayne McGregor: We’ve been trying to work out how to get a digital presence closer to a live presence. We’ve done lots of projects over the years, such as the very first remote location performances between Canada and Berlin – which were in the 90s, way before Zoom – where we were able to mediate presence digitally and live in real-time. As well as the first livestream dances that we did in London in the 90s. We’ve been really curious about how we can make a digital body feel like a real body. And, you know, in a lot of ways, those experiments have always failed, because there’s something really incredible in particular about real bodies. I’ve always been on the hunt for technology and processes that would allow us to do that in a really interesting way. And then I met Jeffrey.

BP: Could you describe On The Other Earth – what exactly is it?
Jeffrey Shaw: On The Other Earth is an experimental dance experience where we are using a unique technology: a 360 degree LED visualisation environment, which I developed at Hong Kong Baptist University. It gives Wayne the opportunity to create a new kind of dance experience, which would be impossible to do in a normal stage environment. The audience are in the centre of this eight-metre-diameter cylinder and the dancers surround them. It’s a very intimate experience.
WMG: It’s a twenty-four metre screen, four metres high, that wraps around an audience of twenty. The brilliant thing about it is, when you’re in that space, you basically have an infinite perspective. So you can create dance that’s sixty or seventy metres away, but then it can come up right beside you. Because it’s 3D, you can take the dancers off the screen and they come into your space. So you’re right inside the dance. You can work with a very extreme perspective, and at the same time, have dancers pass through the space.

“…you can create dance that’s sixty or seventy metres away, but then it can come up right beside you.”

“…it’s a very intense audio experience.”

BP: The technology that goes into a work like this is mindblowing, what exactly are we working with here?
JS: We are using LED panels, but we have a custom design and custom construction, which is this 360-degree cylinder. The imagery is stereoscopic, so it’s true 3D. Using shutter glass technology, as well as the LEDs, means that you have very, very high-quality 3D. It’s probably the best 3D people have ever seen. And not only that, it’s a 3D experience that completely surrounds you, so it puts you in a completely other visual world. The floor is black, the ceiling is black, so you don’t have any reference to the ‘real’ space. You are really transported into another space altogether. There’s quite a lot of computing power that’s needed to drive this system, because the resolution is quite high. We have a total resolution of 12,000 pixels all around and 2,000 pixels high. But in effect, because it’s 3D, you are doubling the resolution. The stereoscopic imagery is being presented at quite a high frequency. It’s 120 hertz, 120 frames per second, 60 frames going to the left eye, 60 frames going to the right eye. It’s just a way of achieving very, very high-quality ste- reoscopic perception. We have altogether seven computers behind the screen with high-end graphics cards and also a very powerful audio infrastructure, because the surround sound is a very important component of this work. We have eight speakers around the bottom, eight speakers around the top, and also three big subwoofers, so it’s a very intense audio experience.

BP: How was all of it filmed?
WMG: It was pretty technical to film. I think one of the reasons these technologies are underdeveloped is that it’s quite a complex process. I mean, first of all, filming in 3D anyway is a challenge. But we had to set up an environment that’s really, really coherent. For a lot of On The Other Earth, the dancers are in a black void. So they have to be on a floor that you do not see, which means you have to have a very particular surface on the floor, which is very, very, very black. The lighting has to be very specific. We filmed at the Roundhouse in London because we wanted to have a camera in the middle of a space, allowing us to create choreography that has no entrances and exits and really works in 360. We also filmed in 3D on the helipad on top of The Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. I wanted to find a space that was really extraordinary that I could deliver the audience into. You feel like you’re there. The dancers danced on top of the helipad, which had its own challenges, not least because it was 40 floors up and really windy.
JS: The filming on the helipad was done with a 360-degree stereoscopic video camera, which is actually a ring of twelve cameras. The total resolution for these twelve cameras is 12K. So this is a camera which basically records at full 360 degrees in 3D in one go. We used another 3D rig, which was just two 4K cameras side-by-side, each running at 60 frames per second. These were used to film the dancers in the black box studio. Once you’ve filmed in a black box studio, the dancers can then be compositionally arranged and placed in the virtual world. We also did photogrammetry, which means digitising the dancers with a camera, where you are taking hundreds of photographs from different points of view and then building a model afterwards in software by combining all these images. Then we did LiDAR scanning of the environment, which uses a laser scanner to scan the environment. This was something done at various locations in Hong Kong and on top of the helipad. The other technique we used is motion capture. We went into a studio and the dancers were motion-captured to create 3D models. So ultimately, there’s a whole range of, you could say, all the digital tools that are available to us. This was then all brought together in the final editing process and the panoramic composition.
WMG: We were in Hong Kong for three months working on it in the lab. Just the technical side of things, after we had filmed all the dancers.

BP: In the writing around the piece, the term ‘post-cinema’ comes up a lot. I’m very intrigued by this term, what makes something post-cinematic?
WMG: It’s post-cinematic in the way that you’re able to tell narratives – however loosely you want to define ‘narratives’ – in 360, in real-time, in 3D. You, as a member of the audience, choose where you’re looking at any one point, and you construct the choreographic narrative. It’s almost like everything, everywhere, all at once. I also think it’s post-cinematic in that it’s interactive, you are interacting with the other people who are also there. So, conventionally, in a cinema you sit down and watch a fixed point, you’re not really interacting with the people you’re next to, you don’t see them as part of the image. It’s that hybridity that makes it post-cinematic.
JS: For me, it’s also to do with the expansion of cinematic language. At the beginning of cinema, there were many places it could go, in terms of its evolution. But a certain model of cinema prevailed, where you go to a theatre and there’s a screen in front of you and you buy a ticket and the film lasts for one or two hours. This became the form in which cinema expressed itself. We see big changes now. We see changes thanks to television and the internet, but also the gaming industry is a very interesting extension of cinematic language because it introduced the dynamic of interactivity. So, we’re taking the cinematic experience to a new place. It’s very suited to live performance, or to the capturing of performance. We’ve done some experiments in the past, also with theatre. We did a big project with The Wooster Group, a very famous theatre company in New York, and they made a one-hour movie in our 360-degree system, which was literally theatre in the round.

“It’s post-cinematic in that it’s interactive, you are interacting with the other people who are also there.”

Things were happening all over the place. One of the interesting aspects of this im- mersive cinematic space is that you can run multiple narratives in parallel, in different directions. That means that the audience is given a very special freedom. You can choose where you want to look. It has another interesting characteristic that you could come back and watch this work a second or third time and it would never be the same. With some great movies, you may go and see it a second time. But, generally, you watch a movie once or you read a novel once. The great aspect of this work is that you can revisit it many times, and each time, have a completely fresh experience. And that, for me, is a bit like listening to music. I mean, we listen to music over and over again. So it belongs a little bit to that world where the work itself has almost an infinite extension, in terms of its potential to be experienced.

“What I’m noticing in technology is that this space is closing together.”

BP: How do you think this piece and the utilisation of this kind of technology will influence dance? Are we witnessing the future of dance here?
WMG: I think we get very used to talking in tropes in relation to our art forms, right? And one of the tropes of dancing – I hear it so much it makes me cringe – is, “Oh, dance is of the moment! It’s transient, it’s exceptional!” That applies to all human experience! I think one of the other tropes is that we’ve always said that a digital body will never replace a human body. And what I’m noticing in technology is that this space is closing together. A live, biological human presence is always going to be different from a virtual presence, but the gap between them is closing. And actually, with On The Other Earth, some people have said, because we have a questionnaire after, that they preferred it to live dance. Now, this is interesting to me. These things can work in parallel. One doesn’t have to negate the other, they’re different experiences. But you can still have an empathetic connection with the digital dance as you can with a live dance.
JS: I think one way of comparing what we are doing in terms of developing these new visualisation technologies, which basically offer a new language for the cinema, is if you think back to the early days of the cinema, when people went to watch a movie, they were basically watching a movie of a theatrical experience. It was only later that filmmakers discovered they could do other things with filmmaking. They could do montage, collage, they could jump forward in time, jump back in time. And, of course, you have the extraordinary experiments of Georges Méliès, who discovered that you could do all these amazing special effects and even send people to the moon! So in a way, what we’re looking at here is also a new technological infrastructure, an infrastructure for recording and for presentation which opens up a whole new language and whole new modalities in which performance can be presented to the public.