Alexander Whitley, Dancing in Augmented Realities, Mandrake Hotel review

It’s the culmination of an extraordinary journey through choreographer Alexander Whitley’s long-standing involvement with science, which brings Virtual Reality (VR) to bear upon dance: Celestial Motion II, a total immersion into the universe.

It’s part of Whitley’s one-week residency at the Mandrake Hotel, it’s free to walk-ins and I can’t recommend it highly enough. In a small dark room just off the hotel’s lush bar, you don a headset and hold two handles. Your guides push a key or two in a laptop and suddenly you find yourself suspended in a cosmic landscape (a word of advice: if you suffer from vertigo, don’t look down). All around you are bright stars and the occasional pale blur of a nebula.

It’s dazzling enough, but it gets better: you’re soon joined by a group of dancers, their bodies made up entirely of points of gold light. Their continuous, sinuous movement is hypnotic and seems to draw you inexorably to the heart of the sun, which suddenly appears right in front of you in all its fiery golden glory.

‘Awesome’ is an overused word, but this really is awesome.

And it's just the final chapter. Your experience of Whitley’s work with VR and AR (Augmented Reality) starts the moment you push open the hotel doors to find yourself in a dark passage. Projected on the wall in front of you is Chaotic Body I: Strange Attractor. Here we see the result of digital artists Uncharted Limbo Collective’s work on a recorded piece of dance: a film where the dancer’s every movement generates ectoplasmic lines and trails, something Alexander Whitley describes as ‘fluid turbulence.’

If you visit at certain times (see below) you can see Alexander Whitley at work. His whole body will be dotted with the blue sensors of an inertial tracking system (don’t worry, he’ll explain), which captures his movement to show it on a screen in front of him.

He will explain how it all works and why, and talk with contagious enthusiasm about the ongoing collaborations between different branches of art and science to create hybrid forms, such as his own blends of digital art and dance.

The good news is, you can enjoy his work as it appears before you with no further scientific explanations: like all good artworks, it speaks for itself, and how! But the other bit of good news is that the science and its intersection with the world of dance are genuinely interesting, and should you want to explore it a little further you’ll find in Alexander Whitley a knowledgeable guide, keen to share his very clear fascination with the infinite possibilities of his research.

NOTE: The installation will be available to walk-ins from Monday 27 June to Friday 1 July.
Alexander Whitley will be at work in the Mandrake Hotel Mon-Tues 5-6 pm; Wed 2-3 pm and Thu-Fri 6-7pm

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