3D artist Groenendijk and dancer-choreographer Palgi blend the performing and visual arts to depict the universal ‘looping’ of time, bodies and life. Dance takes centre stage. In the digital space, an infinity is brought to life that extends both the cycles of the day and the cycle of death and birth. The audience are thus invited to trace – and indeed to shape – the patterns and cycles of life, across three acts that they can arrange themselves: Alone. We repeat. Endlessly. Alone. We repeat. Endlessly …

 This miniature piece, presented in 180° stereoscopic VR, features two dancers, Misha Ostenrath and Kevin Beyer, who are members of the New Human Body Society led by the Cologne-based artist Charlotte Triebus.

The starting point is brute force as a strategy: how systematic trial-and-error forces are utilised both in algorithms and in warfare.

The work explores guilt and innocence, states that are so elusive in the age of AI when considered in relation to subjects and non-human agents.

In the choreography, the human figures are delicate, fallible and they fall; in their costumes by Flora Miranda, they almost blend into their surroundings. What can be heard are texts, narrative fragments, rhythmically distorted, as well as intricate algorithms. In this way, violence becomes a poetic method which, through its very impossibility, opens up a search: for understanding, meaning and protection.

 This VR installation centres on Marko, a Ukrainian Vogue dancer, and his abandoned and now inaccessible flat in the Donbas region. War has been raging there for ten years.

Marko’s home is now a virtual space, created using a 3D scan of photographs. He can now reclaim it. In doing so, the idea of a physically lost home is linked to the dancer’s body as an indestructible home.

The VR film is enriched by Marko’s commentary as he guides the viewer through the flat, structured as a hypnosis session designed to evoke memories. The gaps are left for the audience to fill.

And the space is interwoven with 3D scans of photographs showing recently destroyed Ukrainian buildings. The Vogue dance becomes a weapon by pitting the strength and vulnerability of the dancing body against military technology.

The American dance artist describes “Underdeck 360°” as part of a growing series of dialogues between her dancing body – with its bodily and extra-corporeal senses – and the “personas” of different environments. Each of these dialogues explores how ‘conscious listening’ can be embodied as a process: being attentive during communication between myself and another person, whilst simultaneously perceiving the feelings and needs on my own side and on the other person’s. In ‘Underdeck 360’, filmed in 360°, the dancer encounters pebbles, walls, a leaf, light and shadow, and water in an underground space. She rubs, clears away, rolls and lies down.