Developed in Hong Kong, the world’s first 3D 360-degree LED viewing platform is now the site of two dance-based immersive and interactive experiences. Chitralekha Basu reports.

With its opening at the JC Contemporary art space in Tai Kwun on June 25, Wayne McGregor: On the Other Earth completes a cycle. The piece had premiered at the 19th International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Venice in 2025 and was on show at Stone Nest in London’s West End the same year. It picked up the award for Best Dance Film at the 2025 National Dance Awards in the UK before traveling back to the city of its origin. For the one-of-a-kind technology driving the immersive digital experience was developed at the Hong Kong Baptist University’s Visualization Research Centre.  

On the Other Earth picks up from where Deepstaria — a Studio Wayne McGregor production that had its Asia premiere at Hong Kong’s Xiqu Centre two years ago — left off. There are overlaps, in terms of theme, dancers featured and costume aesthetics. In Deepstaria, choreographer-director Wayne McGregor conjures up an aquatic world, with the jellyfish as a metaphor for regeneration at its center.

With On the Other Earth, the major difference is in the format. The piece is streamed on “the world’s first 3D 360-degree post-cinematic LED screen”, a technology called nVis. Wearing 3D glasses, viewers are surrounded by a circular digital screen. The virtual dancers appear to be within touching distance and sometimes perhaps a bit too close for comfort. Occasionally their looming, towering digital figures come bounding at the viewers like speeding cars and disintegrate into a million granules after the collision.

At one point, the dance floor is flipped upside down, and the dancers appear suspended from it. At a postshow sharing session on the opening day, McGregor pointed out that it is the patter of the dancers’ feet that registers first with the viewer, guiding them toward seeking out the corresponding movement.

The technology that supports newer ways of experiencing a live performance was developed by academics Jeffrey Shaw and Sarah Kenderdine. Their brainchild, the viewing platform nVis, has opened up newer possibilities in choreography in a mixed-reality space where human and digital bodies, live and recorded movements, can come together.

On the Other Earth is supported by the Hong Kong film production house Shaw Studios. Another more obvious Hong Kong element about it is the numbers performed by Hong Kong Ballet dancers. Viewers are taken on a virtual ride up the sky well of a typical Hong Kong courtyard surrounded by skyscrapers before landing on the helipad of the Peninsula Hotel, where HK Ballet dancers are seen performing against a 360-degree view of the Victoria Harbour.

The role of viewers

The nVis screen installed at Tai Kwun is also the site of eMBody — everybody in motion, an interactive motion capture-based experience created by Shaw and Kenderdine with choreography by McGregor. The piece is supported by the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.

Using a hand-held device, viewers can pair up with one of the eight virtual dancers, maneuvering — to an extent — its movements. For instance, a viewer can unravel their virtual “partner” down to a row of pixels, and restore the figure to its original form. A viewer can also move a section of their virtual partners across the screen and splice it together with parts from another figure.

The breaking down-and-rebuilding leitmotif figures in both On the Other Earth and eMBody, though in the latter piece viewers get to decide whether and how they wish to see their virtual partners reconfigured.

Shaw uses a poetic analogy to explain the idea of these viewer-activated infinite renewals. “Just as poetry reconfigures speech in order to say more than what can be spoken, the digital deconstruction and reconstruction of dance in On the Other Earth and eMBody aims at expanding the range of our bodies’ eloquence beyond what can be expressed corporeally.”

He adds that it is the presence of viewers that makes each show unique, although “the building blocks of the work” — motion-capture choreography, visual and sound designs — cannot be manipulated by them. “Every audience member interacts differently, thereby creating a ‘live’ performance,” he says.

Citing yet another analogy, this time of an orchestra performing a piece of classical music, Shaw says, “While the score is a constant, every conductor, and every orchestra provides a different interpretation, and even the same orchestra and conductor does not offer cloned performances. In eMBody’s case, this variability is provided by the audience’s interactivity.”

If you go

Wayne McGregor: On the Other Earth and eMBody — everybody in motion

Dates: Through Aug 2

Venue: JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central

www.taikwun.hk/en/programme/detail/

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com