DANCE, SPACIAL COMPUTING, and the NATURAL WORLD: GETTING BACK TO IT

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​Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), sometimes referred to as Spatial Computing, is an exciting frontier of modern technology (Apple Vision Pro and MetaQuest, anyone?). The dance community has tiptoed to that edge, experimenting with how the technology can shape their work and how audiences receive it. 

Interestingly, some works that bring together dance and spatial computing also highlight ecological imagery, phenomenon, and themes. Some even, whether explicitly or more subtly, advocate for changes to our relationship with the natural world: underscoring issues such as climate change, pollution, and habitat loss. 

On the one hand, one might not think that this is an intuitive way to highlight nature and advocate for environmental causes. One isn’t exactly immersed in the pure wonder of the natural world if they have a VR headset on, or if they’re superimposing Pokémon Go on it (a la Ready Player One’s Wade Watts wholly disconnected from the natural world, and really the outside world as a whole, because most of his time is spent within a virtual one). 

Might using these technologies actually obscure our authentic connection with nature? Should we just get back to the body engaging with flora and fauna – no “1”s and “0”s involved? On the other hand, could dance and cutting-edge technology enhance discovery, innovation, and ecological education: the kind that is arguably an indispensable part of addressing the ecological crises at our doorstep (and, some might argue, which have already stepped right inside)? 

Considering these questions, I saw connective tissue with a fundamental debate in the environmental/climate movement: degrowth versus “STI” (science, technology, and innovation). In other words: do we use less or find new ways to use just as much, forestall growth or build, look back to ancient ways of ecological coexistence or innovate? 

Do we even have to choose between the two; can it rather be a “both/and”? And where does dance fit in there – can it make a difference? That’s a lot to unpack, so let’s dive in. 

photo of UNI, courtesy of Boston Ballet

Top companies tip-toeing into AR/VR

Even top dance companies are exploring how AR/VR can enhance their performative work. Through Cynthia Stanley’s Mantle, Martha Graham Dance Company performers highlighted fashion from leading designers through VR – right in Barney’s, an iconic Manhattan department store. “The result is an enthralling blend of soundscape, style and dramatic, intricate movement,” Dance Magazine noted. 

Exhibit B: Boston Ballet’s pop-up installation UNI – which has appeared at various Boston-based festivals and other public events – brings audience members into an immersive VR dance experience. Through the installation the company hopes to expand access to, and enhance public enthusiasm for, concert dance. These two projects – certainly not the only ones of their type – exemplify the immense opportunity at the intersection of spatial computing and dance. 

photo of UNI, courtesy of Boston Ballet

​The ecological, kinetic, and physical 

Though less well-known than those iconic institutions, Particle Ink – which illuminates dance, physical theater, and natural imagery through augmented reality – is using spatial computing technology to highlight ecological themes. Las Vegas Weekly described their work as “imaginative collage of projection-mapped animation, laser light effects, augmented reality, puppetry, dance, and acrobatics.” 

In the group’s presentation on a TedX stage, a dancer moves through a variety of environments. She backbends through waves and leaps amongst the stars, all of which is augmented reality-imposed. She is a sort of foil to a simple man in suspenders and tophat, painting around the ever-shifting environment and struggling to keep his footing as it morphs. The dancer is virtuosic, while he is pedestrian: the “everyman.” 

Both modes of being can be present – and valuable in their own way – in this magical, mercurial world filling the auditorium. Giants and spaceships join them, too; it’s the stuff of fantasy novels and sci-fi films, of the limits of hungry human imaginations. It’s the visceral joining the digital. 

One spoken line resonates, however, which an LA Times review by Todd Martens highlighted: a small augmented reality-created figure says “I wish I was 3D.” The dancer also partners the animated character, versus other flesh-and-blood. What might she have felt missing? It all makes me wonder: the augmented reality imagery is captivating…but can it ever really replace immersion in the real thing, interfacing with the natural world through our own embodiment? 

“This merging of tech and animation into a believable landscape…is the triumph of Particle Ink. But it’s not the show’s heart. This is ultimately a story about loss, and searching to regain one’s footing after extreme grief,” Martens notes. “Particle Ink used creative tools….to show how what we lose continues to live with us.”

With that, I wonder further about the loss of embodied engagement with the natural world; does that confer its own kind of grief? For all of the beauty and wonder that something like Particle Ink offers, perhaps the best way that we could enact its lessons is by leaving the dark theater to look at the stars with our own eyes and feel sand in between our own toes. 

A project through Boston-based The Click, by Lonnie Stanton, offers fodder to a more pointedly look at those questions. Emotive Land was a “site-responsive installation captured on film and translated through technology” to foster “harmony between nature, society and innovation.” People experiencing the installation saw live dance as well as dance superimposed, through augmented reality, on their outdoor surroundings – right along the Charles River.

“What was most exciting about the virtual side is that I could have the dancers in the videos… live in different ways and defy gravity and not live by the rules that we would have to follow in site-specific dance,” said Stanton. Presenting dance through virtual means, whatever the subject matter, does widen the aperture of choreographic capability. For Stanton’s project, that capability manifested in AR highlighting environmental degradation and decay (power plants and receding wetlands, for example) while live dance accentuated healthier ecology. 

The creators also underscore attention as a key focus of the work. “Audience members [were] free to come and go at any time, making their attention, however brief, the most profound acceptance of art itself.” Shown anecdotally and in emerging research, contemporary technology is severely impacting our attentional abilities – and simply how we experience (or don't fully experience) the world around us. Paradoxically, this project used what pulls from the natural world – our devices – to draw our attention back to it…and the care it now needs.

Even more towards themes of environmental advocacy, Stanton “hope[d] to place human expression outside in a way that has no hierarchy: the tree and the squirrel are of no less value than the human in process,” notes Celina Colby for The Bay State Banner. “How do we not assume authority over nature, especially in an urban landscape?” 

Colby also underscores the intriguing positioning of the work in the technological hub of Cambridge, MA’s Kendall Square. She notes the environmental harm that these disciplines have caused (for one, without the combustion engine, would we be staring down a climate crisis?). Yet can these disciplines also have solutions to contribute, considering where we are now? Colby believes that they can; “this project illustrates how technology can be paired with an art form in a productive way, pointing out environmental areas that need attention.”


Degrowth vs innovation…where does dance and embodiment fit in? 

Another Ted talk, Dance vs PowerPoint, certainly presents a point of view on the place of dance in science and innovation. Speaker John Bohannon argues that dance can be part of gainful scientific discovery and innovation – a tool to explore and present complex concepts, more colorfully and productively than common digital means…like PowerPoint. 

He brings receipts, as they say, such as interactions with scientist colleagues and outcomes from his Dance Your PhD program: a contest wherein scientists engage dancers in their research. Perhaps most convincingly, Bohannon’s argument plays out onstage around him – with dancers from Minnesota’s Black Label Movement dancing out a molecular biology phenomenon. Scott Schwertly of Ethos3 describes experiencing that: 

The…movement [shows] how atoms absorb photons and how when they get cold enough they become superfluid, and on and on….[I] don’t know anything about photons or superfluids or molecular biology, but it sure did look pretty to see all the action take place through dancers. And it made sense – much more sense than reading it from a textbook, or worse: a PowerPoint. 

From that lens, dance could be part of gainful STI. Advocates of this perspective posit that we must innovate and build in order to avert climate catastrophe: such as more energy-efficient buildings, expanded public transit, and renewable energy infrastructure. 

Those arguing for degrowth, on the other hand, argue that's just the perspective that led us to this precipice in the first place: unchecked innovation and growth responsible for climatic changes that now haunt us with each freak storm, heat wave, and drought. That’s not to mention the entrenchment of myriad social inequities resulting from that process. 

That all leads a part of me that sees (and yes, enjoys) works like those described above – bringing together ecology, spatial computing, and dance — and thinks “...shouldn’t we all just go outside and move?”. 

On the other hand, these divergent approaches to changing our fundamental relationship with the earth and its resources perhaps don’t need to be so divergent at all; “degrowth neither represents a return to the stone age,” and on the other side of the spectrum, it is not constructive to “fetishize technological solutions to the climate crisis,” Pansera argues. “Today, researchers, practitioners, and activists….envision innovation rooted in creativity, care, repair.”

Perhaps these approaches can tango: counterbalancing and complimenting each other, as different situations may necessitate. Maybe, just maybe, we can then take flight away from climate catastrophe and towards a much better future.  

Perhaps dance can be part of such a thoughtfully multidisciplinary vision – dance like Emotive Land, bringing together the digital and visceral, the scientific and ecological, to focus our attention on that which we urgently need to focus…right now. 

A caution I might offer with respect to dance having a place in scientific innovation: I would hope that such utility wouldn’t be necessary to justify it. For me, the most meaningful part of Dance vs PowerPoint comes at the end. With a bit of tongue-in-cheek, Bohannon conjectures that perhaps someday a new technology will replace the dancers that replaced PowerPoint. At that point, we could experience dance “with no other purpose than to witness the human form in motion.” 

On the one hand, Bohannon offers a logical argument for how dance can be used for something most often seen as more “valuable” or “practical” than dance: science and its fruits. On the other, he demonstrates how such a justification shouldn’t even be needed. The art of the moving body is enough – and we lose much when we discount that. 

Speaking about her dance and augmented reality project, Stanton notes how she finds “the resilience of the weeds growing out of the cement, and the vines getting tangled up with old fencing, really beautiful…. I think an element of hope is important.” Dance can facilitate scientific discovery and environmental public education, and also – even more meaningfully – offer beauty, inspiration, and yes, hope. Why save our planet just to continue living on it without such essential nourishment for the soul? 


Kathryn Boland, 2025