From virtual reality to body chemistry studies: Wayne McGregor on pushing the boundaries of dance in Hong Kong

Far from a conventional stage performance, On the Other Earth redefines audience engagement by immersing viewers in a highly unconventional, simulated reality. The choreography intentionally disrupts our sensory norms, particularly in the scenes where the dancers appear completely inverted.

“We’re so used to reading human bodies from the eyes down with a body that is vertical,” McGregor says. “By doing something as simple as putting the dancers upside down, the body looks extraordinarily different. All our frames of reference and all our cues are altered, meaning you can’t read the movement as easily. It takes far more cognitive work to understand what we’re seeing, which makes the experience both surprising and interesting”.

The piece’s title refers to this exact sensation, transporting the audience, in McGregor’s words, “into this other dimension that explores choreography and dance making from a different point of view, hopefully giving you a different understanding of your own physical intelligence”.

Long before the genesis of On the Other Earth, McGregor had been fascinated with representing choreography across diverse media and dimensions, whether live on stage, in galleries or on film. Two years ago, he was in Hong Kong to stage Deepstaria at Xiqu Centre, which was a production that played with a light-absorbing Vantablack space—an invention that creates the illusion of complete darkness—where his choreography became a meditative dance as if in the mysterious depths of the ocean. Furthermore, his early work Aeon in 2000 explored the nascent possibilities of online livestreaming and digital presence at a time when the world was only a few years into using social media platforms.

For On the Other Earth, McGregor anchored the choreography in an abstract exploration of the unknown. “I’m very interested in the notion of deep space and deep sea,” he says, describing a creative idea centred around looking directly into a void. The piece transitions dynamically through three distinct void-inspired environments displayed across the screens. It begins in the expansive weightlessness of deep space, navigating through cosmic detritus, before entering a strange spaceship that takes on its own form and geometric structure flying through the earth. Finally, the experience plunges into the ocean depths, where McGregor describes that the dancers “become boneless and de-materialise as they become more like jellyfish”.

Bringing this complex environment to life required an unprecedented level of engineering innovation. The performance is supported by the nVis system, which features a 26,000,000-pixel panoramic 3D, state-of-the-art visualisation environment complete with a 29.4-channel surround sound system for a fully immersive experience.

The platform is the brainchild of Jeffrey Shaw, the chair professor of the Academy of Visual Arts and director of the Visualisation Research Centre at Hong Kong Baptist University. Shaw developed this platform as part of a landmark HK$35,000,000 Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Fund project titled Future Cinema Systems: Next Generation Art Technology, which proposed key interactive human-computer interfaces.

McGregor sees On the Other Earth as a prime example of how technology can bring new possibilities to the dance arts. While traditional screens often leave people accustomed to having content passively force-fed to them, this virtual show invites viewers to actively walk around rather than sit, which fundamentally alters the typical consumer dynamic. He also argues that the proximity to the digital representations allows for a level of physical intimacy that is entirely impossible on a traditional proscenium stage. “Visitors can stand incredibly close to the virtual characters, observing the sweat on a dancer’s face or looking directly into the dancers’ eyes,” he says.

This fluid integration of dance and technology is the natural evolution of a career spent working completely outside the institutional boundaries of elite dance schools. Growing up as part of the first generation to have a home computer, McGregor learnt to code at a young age, making technology feel just as natural to his creative process as music. This curiosity long predates the modern art-tech movement; back in the 1990s, when the necessary equipment was the physical size of an entire room, McGregor was already staging the world’s very first bi-directional virtual performances through livestreaming, dancing live in London while collaborating simultaneously with a partner in Canada.

Over the subsequent decades, he observes that technology has evolved from early digital film replication to advanced CGI world-building and generative AI systems that propose choreographic ideas in real time, fuelling his ongoing interest in integrating these advancements into his repertoire. “Now what’s fascinating to me is the relationship with AI and how you can have a creative conversation with a range of AIs that don’t take away from your artistic judgment but in some way open up the opportunities of exploration,” he says.

Despite the advanced nature of On the Other Earth, both McGregor and Webre, who initially made the connection between McGregor and Shaw for the project, firmly agree that digital innovations will never threaten the survival of live arts. Webre views technology simply as an expanded palette of tools for dance expression. “I don’t think that anything will ever replace that exchange of energy between the audience and the performers on stage,” Webre says, calling a live dance performance an “irreplaceable, sacred and cathartic” experience. Ticket sales surging past pre-pandemic levels serve as definitive proof that audiences fundamentally crave these communal, human experiences.

McGregor echoes this exact sentiment, viewing the two mediums as parallel tracks. For him, “live dance will never be replaceable because it demands that you are alive” with a collective group of living people, watching an unpredictable, spontaneous human feat unfold. Instead of competing, the digital space closes the gap of immediacy while offering creative possibilities the physical stage simply cannot execute—such as virtually transporting an audience to experience a performance on the top helipad of the Peninsula Hong Kong, which is featured as one of the settings in On the Other Earth.

Looking resolutely toward the future, McGregor is already preparing to push past the boundaries of explicit physical movement. He is currently embarking on a two-year research fellowship at Oxford University to explore the complex concept of interoception—the internal chemical and hormonal signals that dictate how humans feel excitement or hunger. His analysis of how internal body chemistry unconsciously shapes our physical and spatial choices will form the core data for his upcoming performance pieces. In a way, his signature application and exploration of technology comes from a deep desire to highlight and understand human qualities, whether through a new realisation of our senses in a virtual dance show or the chemicals that contribute to our movements and feelings.

“I want people to see and experience dance, but just think about dance as a form of physical intelligence and think about the skills that physical intelligence has in all the other disciplines: wet robots, sensing technologies, or think about physical intelligence as something that robotics needs,” McGregor says. “Dancers and dance experts have all this incredible expertise in physical intelligence that is applicable in a range of other domains. If we just brought more partnerships to the dance world, it would be really extraordinarily interesting”.

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