Dance Marries Motion Capture Technology in Alexander Whitley's New Work ANTI-BODY at Sadler's Wells This Autumn

Sadler's Wells New Wave Associate Alexander Whitley comes to the Lilian Baylis Studio on Thursday 6 & Friday 7 October with his experimental new work Anti-Body, which uses motion capture technology to explore the biological form of the human body.

Motion capture is a cutting-edge method of capturing movement, for instance from an actor's performance, and translating it into data that can be read by animation software and applied to a 3D character on screen.

Anti-Body explores the tensions between mind and body, containment, and connection.

Three dancers appear between screens, isolated, yet connected through a system of interactive technology. Their costumes incorporate motion capture suits, which enable the choreography to drive a system of motion-responsive visuals created by Uncharted Limbo Collective and generate changes, in real time, in the layers of projections they are surrounded by. The boundaries between self and other, human presence and digital pattern, become increasingly hard to define.

The piece is accompanied by an electrifying score composed by 2021 Mercury Prize nominee Hannah Peel and music producer Kincaid.

Whitley's previous creations include Overflow, which ran at Sadler's Wells Theatre in May 2021. His interest in technology has driven him to devise the Digital Body project launched in lockdown 2020 to remotely create digital dance films, as well as an Augmented Reality filter for Instagram. He is currently working on Future Rites, a Virtual Reality experience based on The Rite of Spring and has launched the AWDC App, a home for the company's interactive digital experiences.

Alexander Whitley says: "Anti-Body's starting point is the theory of trans-humanism, which is founded on the belief that we'll one day be able to download the human mind onto a computer chip. It's a fascinating and somewhat absurd prospect to me, but one extreme example of a tendency of technology to dematerialise our experience, and to pull us away from our immediate physical experience of the world.

"This piece asks questions around what it means to exist in a hybrid real / virtual world, and takes inspiration from a question that Yuval Noah Harari asks in his book Homo Deus: 'Are organisms just algorithms and is life just data processing?' "

Uncharted Limbo Collective are a team of creative coders and visual artists, who work closely with choreographers, film directors, musicians and scientists to create New Media experiences.

Chris Waters, speaking for Uncharted Limbo Collective, says: "For Anti-Body, we performed both a creative role and a technical role. Working closely with Alexander, we created the visual language and aesthetics of the performance and developed a bespoke software system that generates real-time motion and audio-responsive visuals using games engine technology. Through a rapid feedback loop between choreography and computer graphics programming, we iteratively crafted the final projected visuals that are in dialogue with the dancers' movements - and augmented them."

Anti-Body is supported by Arts Council England, DanceEast, DCMS Culture Recovery Fund, John Ellerman Foundation, ERMAK Group, MA scène nationale - Pays de Montbéliard, Nicholas Berwin Charitable Trust, Charles Glanville, Garfield Weston Foundation and the generous support of individual donors. In kind support from Queen Mary University, London, Target 3D and Sodium.

Alexander Whitley is a Sadler's Wells New Wave Associate

Audio Described performance on Friday 7 October at 8 pm

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