Six dancers run circles around you, chasséing an inch away from your face. Cue a taut display of leaps and lightning transitions. You are enveloped with movement, straining to catch the action. The dancers rush into pairs, and the women now have their moment of bravura. It is all legs, legs, legs: swinging at extreme angles around the men and in perfect harmony with the trills of an unseen piano.
You are close enough to see the sweat and sinew, but only as an invisible voyeur. This is not a nightmarish throwback to a childhood ballet class, but a Friday night in with an Oculus headset and Helen Pickett’s Petal.
Ever an innovator of the balletic form, Boston Ballet has commissioned three choreographers to create works designed entirely for VR. This latest suite — Zoom In by Ken Ossola, a reworked version of Pickett’s renowned Petal, and On (my) line, In (my) mind by My’Kal Stromile — will soon be available to view through the Oculus headset (or on your smartphone).
“We have to be a living theatre, for today’s people,” says Mikko Nissinen, Boston Ballet’s artistic director. “To become that, we needed to take this risk.”
Boston Ballet is the first major company to have blended VR and ballet to such a degree. And instead of bending classical choreography to fit the needs of a virtual environment, the latest ballets are designed for the headset — all original pieces with choreographic depth and technical nous.
When watching Ossola’s Zoom In, an iridescence created through clever lighting shrouds each dancer, making them appear otherworldly. His phrasing subtly references other forms (spot Kathak, salsa, Martha Graham spirals). As you stand in the middle of an undulating semi-circle of bodies, each moving with snakelike ports de bras, you discover how eye contact can change the tenor of a performance.
By its very design, VR dance is meant to be this visceral. The audience is but a hair away from the action, and occasional trips and slides, and the intricacies of choreography and gesture. Pickett describes the experience as akin to “having the movement land on your skin”.
The audience, now with total agency, is no longer directed by the artistic choices made by the creative team. Boston’s choreographers realised that VR shatters the established conventions of dance performance, for wherever the viewer looks, something different is happening.
“All the choreography has to be designed to move around the camera in a circular way,” says Ossola. “I discovered new ways to guide the audience. You have to manage the space to constantly excite them.”
In Stromile’s case, he treated the VR-enabled cameras as dancers themselves — approaching human and machine as artistic equals. He designed a set of solos featuring a handheld camera. The camera is passed from one dancer to another, creating an intense point-of-view experience for those watching. The cameras start to take on a movement language of their own, and Stromile acknowledges that “without realising it, the audience becomes part of the choreography.”
Such intimacy also hints at an obvious pitfall — that VR dance can be almost too close for comfort. VR upends the fantasy of a ballet as a perfect construction. Dancers are revealed as fallible, choreography as an artifice. Escapism and a sense of magic are difficult when donning headgear and effectively standing in the middle of the stage.
It is not just audiences that have to adapt. “Rehearsing the piece was difficult,” Ossola says. “Dancers’ energy relies on sensing the tension in the audience. It obviously isn’t there in VR.”
“Each dancer has to dance the entire thing like it’s a solo,” says Stromile. “Because at any moment someone can choose to look at you the entire time.”
With choreography having to adapt to the unique pressures of a VR audience, it raises the question: will VR dance become a sub-genre in and of itself, a second cousin to the proscenium?
Pickett is effusive about the possibilities. For her, working in VR “took my breath away. This level of intimacy was thrilling and what I have worked for my entire career.”
Sydney Skybetter, professor of choreographics at Brown University and one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies, is not surprised that VR is finally being taken up by the industry. “The stage, as a concept, was actually a disruptive technology when it first entered the ballet world, so we shouldn’t be surprised when contemporary technologies inevitably push older ones aside,” he says.
Scottish Ballet has consistently pushed to bring ballet into the 21st century. In 2017, it became the first ballet company to present a digital season. Visionary artistic director Christopher Hampson thinks the next big thing in dance and technology will be enmeshing VR with haptics — technologies that can create an experience of touch. “It could open up a whole new realm of movement. It will challenge creators to think differently,” he says.
One such creator is the genre-defying Alexander Whitley Company. Royal Ballet-trained Whitley’s team are working on an interpretation of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring. His upcoming Future Rites (due to be premiered next year) will use artificial intelligence to enable audiences to dance alongside professionals.
“It will be a highly participatory experience,” says Whitley. An audience member will be able to control their own avatar and move alongside the dancers. As “dance’s primary language is emotion”, Whitley believes Future Rites will speak to people at that most basic level.
By its nature, dance harnesses emotion and empathy to bring us back to our bodies. But dancing on a virtual stage has the immersive power to take us out of them entirely. While Boston Ballet has broken new ground, the real test of the longevity of VR will be where it goes from here. Only time will tell if other companies can continue to push the outer limits of ballet — an art form not known for its embrace of modernity or progress.
“I think that if the younger generations can experience ballet this way, they will come to the theatre,” says Pickett. “And surely, that is the argument for other companies to get on board.”
Boston Ballet will soon release its latest VR works on bostonballet.org
