Why is Virtual Reality an exciting medium for dance?
Text by Sarah Neville
As a choreographer who has been working with technology through out my career, I am fascinated with virtual reality and the potential to extend my choreographic practice through this form. Dance in a virtual reality environment is an embodied participatory experience, which means that you experience it with your whole body by dancing. It is also a social practice between yourself and a digital environment and yourself and others because you are moving and relating to digital forms in a virtual reality environment and at the same time as expressing yourself through your body to others who are watching and waiting their turn. This immersive form allows contemporary dance to be accessed through personal experience because the dance only exists when the participant joins in. When the value of contemporary dance is continuously thrown into question, this personal experience is important.
Felicia Hick participating in Sarah Neville’s Spheres a Dance for Virtual Reality, Photograph by Sarah Neville
Dance and virtual reality both demand an embodied experience as they are both activated physically. A dance begins when the dancer moves and virtual reality applications begin when the participant engages. Interestingly, when I first raise the topic of a heightened sense of embodiment in virtual reality environments, I am often met with surprise from those who expect that being immersed in a visual and audio environment leads to a sense of disembodiment. I understand, since if you watch a movie your sense of your body fades when sight and sound meet the imagination. However, virtual reality is not only a visual and audio experience and this medium shares very little with film. 360° visuals and surround sound require the head and the body to turn to fully appreciate the scope of the virtual world, then to activate and interact with the environment you must move. Embodiment means you are motivated to move and enjoy the experience through movement. No longer does a dance audience need to appreciate dance at arms length, but rather their movements become central to the dance. I will explain through the following examples.
You have bought a ticket and joined the line, ahead you see your friend in a virtual reality headset, waving controllers in front of them. They are swaying, reaching, bending down then looking skyward and cowering as they dance in their own world. Then they are still, the attendant assists to remove their headset. Your friend smiles, and it is your turn.
There are 2 pink spheres on your hands so you put them together and they glow, emitting an electric buzz. There is an avatar in front of you, it is transparent, soft yet strongly marked with tribal paint. The poetic movement invites you to touch your sphere with theirs. They glow in appreciation and move slightly more vibrantly, encouraged you move to do it again and find yourself caught in a dance. Looking around you find other digital dance partners and notice that your world of silver sand and a low sun is inhabited by other dance couples and you are one of them.
The avatars fade and small figures sprout up. Are they like you? Are they human or plant matter? They wriggle and pose, waving pink spheres above their heads. You touch your sphere to theirs and find you can pick them up and replace them. Caught in play, choreographic, spatial and design opportunities open up.
Pulling yourself off the ground, you look around. The sun is setting and there are shadows extending across the sand. Whose shadow? Looking towards the horizon, first you hear them then you see them. Giants. Coming closer. They might pick you up…One is looking directly at you…fade to white. An assistant comes and helps you remove the headset.
Digital still from Sarah Neville’s Spheres a Dance for Virtual Reality
This is a description of Spheres, a Dance for Virtual Reality, a six-minute linear, interactive dance work. This performance experience was inspired by my observations of current choreographic developments for immersive digital environments, specifically the work of choreographers Alexander Whitley from the UK and Gilles Jobin from Switzerland. These choreographers are creating embodied experiences in dance through virtual reality for what Jobin refers to as the new stages of contemporary dance. Impressed by how virtual reality can excite a participant to move, feel and connect to their own body and be transported to another world in which they have agency to make change, I applied this knowledge to my own choreographic practice.
Alexander Whitley (2019) was resident choreographer at Sadlers Wells where he invited me to observe the making and trialling of a new version of his virtual reality work Celestial Motion. In this work, Whitely invites the viewer to experience what it is to dance in a world inhabited by astronomical properties. The dancers in the work move like stardust, tacitly without guiding the participant directly through any instruction, encourage them to move in chorus with their choreography. The choreographic design leads the participant to develop an empathetic understanding for what it might be like to be a contemporary dancer by being with the dancers in their world. Simultaneously, Whitley plays with the choreographic possibilities that have emerged within this new platform for dance to stretch his choreographic practice.
Digital Still from Alexander Whitley’s Celestial Motion 2
Influenced by his time spent as a dancer in Wayne McGregor’s company, Whitley is interested in how dancers think through the body as understood through cognitive science. This process is often best explained through choreographic tasking. What Celestial Motion 2 as an experience does, is provide an insight into tasking as a choreographic practice by encouraging the viewer to mirror the movement of the dancers around them and to change what they are doing to dance in tune with the avatars or to move around the visual effects. There are stars to gaze at, moons to dodge and dancers that dazzle when touched. This dance reveals elements of physical problem solving with its audience, which is what dancers in the studio do to generate dance content and it is this type of dancing that Whitley would like to share with his audience.
Gilles Jobin’s (2019) approach is slightly different as he likens the experience of his work, to being a dancer on stage, playing yourself within an immersive, world. His interactive work VR_I a Dance for Virtual Reality, puts the participant front and centre, driving their own story within the digital world full of remote desserts, open skies, expansive parks and exquisite architecture. Inhabiting the full bodied digital avatar of one of Jobin’s dancers, you can look out for other dancers to play with, giants to behold and miniature people on display. According to Jobin, this sense of performing as the hero of your own story is key to why his work has such universal appeal. When a dancer is on stage they are performing themselves, not acting a character, but rather experiencing their own emotions with the movement, so in VR_I the participant is being themselves performing. Jobin makes himself available to chat to the participant’s after the work and they often speak about their relationship to their body inside the virtual space.
Photo credit : Sarah Neville and her daughter experiencing Jilles Jobin’s VR_I, A Dance for Virtual Reality at Swiss Days, Dance Festival Lausanne 2019, Photograph by Susana Panadés Diaz
When choreographers work with virtual reality, not only are they allowing participants to experience contemporary dance first hand but encouraging them to become more aware of their own bodies within the work. This is why experiencing dance in virtual reality within an interactive application is an embodied experience, whereby the role of the participant is central to choreographing and activating the dance. It seems to me that the choreographic potential to work in virtual reality is only just emerging and this is a very exciting time for choreographers to stretch their skills within these new stages for dance.
Jobin, G. (2019, 15/02/19) Dance and Virtual Reality/Interviewer: S. Neville.
Whitley, A. (2019, 10/01/19) Dance and Virtual Realiy/Interviewer: S. Neville.