Side Steps

Newcomer

VR Dance Club

The audience sits in the dark, invisible, untouchable, uninvolved—a model that stubbornly persists? Perhaps it is precisely this ability to disappear that makes the classic auditorium so comfortable. And so outdated.

VR Dance Club is not about dancing with glasses. The project ensemble opens up virtual spaces of possibility—for states in which perception shifts, reality is superimposed, and encounters are newly created. Those who enter do not remain outside. Those who stay become part of it. Visitors encounter each other in Hybrid Encounters, from VR headset to drawing board. Movement becomes line, dialogue emerges. What appears reduced is precisely placed: a designed experience by the duo Anna-Carolin Weber and Tobias Kopka, who founded and lead VR Dance Club. They do not choreograph sequences, but conditions.

Hybrid Encounters was developed among other places at the Dortmund Akademie für Theater und Digitalität. There, the focus is never on exploring what happens when digital technology meets art. But rather on the question of where one arrives when artistic questions are answered with digital tools.

“How do we see each other when we don’t see each other?” is the central question of the project ensemble: In The Future Is Us, visitors dance through the space, connected and separated by audio instructions. In I Spy With My Little Eye, shared images emerge without participants seeing the same thing. The fact that complicated technology is used is actually irrelevant: Like in a video game, you don't have to read an instruction manual beforehand. Only at first glance does digital technology bring a sense of heaviness.

Weber and Kopka respond to this with movement scores— tasks that don't dictate what happens, but rather how something can happen. Co-creation as practice: Those who engage, act. The works depend on this.The path to this leads through artistic research—through miniatures, experiments, and even failure. Insight arises not from thinking about dance, but from the act of performing. The body grasps what the mind already believes it knows. The after-effects are striking. Conversations begin where the performance ends. Those who were just moving try to clarify what happened—and with whom. Perhaps the core lies not in the event itself, but in what it triggers between people.

Timon Brombach

We Are In This Together, Dortmund, Akademie für Theater und Digitalität, 19 May; Hybrid Encounters – A VR Dance Experience, Bonn, Deutsches Museum, 6, 7 June; www.vrdanceclub.de