Dance once belonged to the stage – a fixed rectangle of floor, audience in fixed seats, the shimmer of spotlight, the expectation of entrance, exit, return bow. But in the hands of Wayne McGregor, it has quietly begun to outgrow architecture. With Infinite Bodies at Somerset House and its companion installation On the Other Earth at Stone Nest, McGregor invites us to witness not a retrospective but a radical transformation: dance becomes habitat, body becomes data, memory becomes algorithm – and the audience becomes participant in a living choreography that moves, breathes and evolves around them. This is not theatre. It is not performance in the traditional sense. It is a new topography of the body, rendered in light, sound, code – and charged with the restless energy of possibility.
From the moment you step into the Embankment Galleries, you are not just entering an exhibition but a theatre of expanded perception. The first thing you sense isn’t a programme but a pulse: a subtle vibration in the air, the faint hum of electronics, the quiet anticipation of movement yet to unfold. This is dance unbound – free to roam the walls, slip into shadows, multiply into data points, gather into sculptural shadows, shift in time. Here, in this space, in this moment, the body is not fixed but fluid; identity is not contingent on shape or form, but on motion, on relation, on response.
After 30+ years leading one of the most adventurous choreographic practices of our time, McGregor has never seemed more restless – or more alive. What strikes you in Infinite Bodies is not nostalgia or culmination, but insatiable curiosity. The exhibition pulses with projects that fold professional dance into interactive light sculptures, AI choreography engines, sonic architectures and cinematic avatars. Swinging between analogue immediacy and digital abstraction, the works trace a long arc – from the early politics of movement to the speculative terrains of what dance might become.
In one room you pass through the dramatic, high-gloss visuals of OMNI, created with a world-renowned effects studio, where choreography merges seamlessly with digitally rendered environments. A dancer’s gesture dissolves into particles; space fractures into shards of color and light; movement becomes matter. It feels less like witnessing a performance than being submerged inside one – weightless, disorienting, alive. Then elsewhere, kinetic light sculptures by collaborators long-associated with McGregor respond to human presence with sweeping arcs and ethereal glows. These are not props. They are living systems that shift with every breath, react to every footstep, blur the boundary between flesh and engineered form.
But where the exhibition could have veered into the cold territory of techno-fetishism, it returns again and again to fragility – to memory, to vulnerability, to intimacy. In the deep gloam of Deepstaria Void, sound isn’t just heard – it is felt, enveloping you from all directions. Invisible Mountain have composed a sonic architecture that continuously recomposes itself, an acoustic organism shaped by Bronze AI. It doesn’t just accompany movement — it is movement, in sound. You become aware of your own stillness, your pulse, the subtle way your body occupies space. Suddenly presence matters.
At the core of the exhibition lies The Living Archive – a digital psalter of McGregor’s choreographic experiments, a vast accumulation of motion capture data, rehearsal footage, fragmented forms of movement that were once ephemeral, now digitised. But more than museum documentation, the Archive is alive. Its engine – AISOMA – is an AI tool trained on McGregor’s own choreographic vocabulary. Visitors are invited to engage with it, to generate their own movement in dialogue with decades of practice. In this way, choreography becomes communal, historical yet immediate; archive becomes collaborator, not relic.
And yet, for all this ambition, there is still the sense of the human gesture: the stretch of a spine, the moment a hand trembles, the almost invisible breath before a leap. In the Great Arch Hall, photographer Indigo Lewin’s images capture dancers long after the curtain has closed, long before the next performance – in rehearsal, in pause, in thought. In these unguarded, prosaic moments, the exhibition finds its balance. Because if technology threatens to fragment the body – render it data, vector, pixel – Lewin’s quiet portraits remind us of what remains essential: vulnerability, presence, flesh, breath.
Still, Somerset House – celebrating its 25th birthday – feels like the perfect host for this restless hybridity. A place once associated with history and permanence now becomes a workshop of transformation, a space that doesn’t preserve but incubates. Infinite Bodies doesn’t ask for reverence. It demands participation, attention, openness. And it rewards it with surprise. But the daring doesn’t end at the riverside. In the West End, at Stone Nest, McGregor reaches further, rewriting the rulebook. On the Other Earth is not a dance performance. It is an environment. A planetary body. A living digital world. Inside a cylindrical 12K screen that surrounds viewers, dancers from Company Wayne McGregor and the Hong Kong Ballet move with hyperreal presence, their forms rendered in living 3-D imagery across 26 million pixels. The screen isn’t background – it is architecture. The floor, the walls, the entire cylinder hum with possibility; you don’t watch the dance, you inhabit it. Sound – spatialised and immersive – pulses through the space, designed by the collective founding sound designer behind Oscar-winning film scores. People move in small groups; each moment unfolds differently. It is intimate, overwhelming, uncanny.
The fact that McGregor invites us into this world does not feel like an exhibition of achievements but an act of generosity, of hope. He is not showing us what he has done so much as what dance might become. And by combining human bodies, mechanical systems, code and reverie, he suggests that the future of movement is multiplicity – not only many bodies, but many ways of being bodily. How much of “you” remains when your form is translated into light? Into data? Into immersive sound? That question underpins much of the exhibition’s tension – and its beauty. Infinity Bodies doesn’t answer neatly. It offers space to be moved, to move, to remember. It asks us to feel the body as social, mechanical, digital – as possibility.
Throughout, the company of Wayne McGregor remains present – not as star performers, but as living anchors, spectral yet fleshly, unpredictable yet grounded. Their unscheduled activations in the galleries dissolve the line between audience and performer. Their movement is never fixed, always becoming. And that, perhaps, is what the exhibition is about: movement not as product, but as process; dance not as presentation, but as evolution. Because what McGregor does here is not archive. It is research. Not homage. It is hypothesis. Not a celebration. It is invitation. And in so doing, he reminds us not only that the body does still matters, but that, in fact, it may matter more than ever.
Infinite Bodies and On the Other Earth offer a new paradigm for performance; a blueprint for dance in an age that no longer knows what borders mean. They demand not applause, but presence. Not closure, but openness. And most of all, they demand belief – in bodies, in technology, in possibility. If dance once lived in theatre, now it lives everywhere. And the future feels wide open.
Infinite Bodies is at Somerset House, London, until 22 February 2026.
somersethouse.org.uk
Words: Simon Cartwright
Image Credits:
1. Wayne McGregor, ON THE OTHER EARTH, Hong Kong Ballet (Gouta Seki, Wang Qingxin) 2025. Photo credit: Ravi Deepres.
2. Installation view of Wayne McGregor Infinite Bodies at Somerset House. Photo by Ravi Deepres.
3. Wayne McGregor, ON THE OTHER EARTH, Company Wayne McGregor, 2025. Photo credit: Ravi Deepres
4. Company Wayne McGregor (Rebecca Bassett-Graham and Jayla O_Connell) with No One is an Island (2021) Random International + Wayne McGregor + Chihei Hakateyama. Part of Wayne McGregor Infinite Bodies exhibition at Somerset House. Photo by Ravi Deepres.
5. Wayne McGregor, ON THE OTHER EARTH, Hong Kong Ballet (Gouta Seki, Wang Qingxin) 2025. Photo credit: Ravi Deepres.
