16 February 2026
I recently went to an exhibition celebrating the choreographer, Wayne McGregor, and his collaborations with other artists, filmmakers and musicians. Bodies meeting robotics, digital systems and AI. In a work called OMNI (meaning “all”, or “of all things”), two human-like figures are moving on a screen in an unbounded space. They are skeletal, Giacometti-like figures, they are stardust, they are streams of energy, systems of nerves, constellations of a multitude of bioluminescent life forms. They come together and move apart, fuse and move through each other, disintegrate into streaming stardust and re-form again, as through the dancers themselves materialise in the space.
I am reminded of traditional Chinese painters who tried to paint not the appearance and form of a rock, a bird or a tree but its qi, its life essence or force, its livingness.
Another work, called No Man is an Island tells us that the minimal amount of information needed for an animated form to be recognised as human is fifteen light points. A moving constellation of light points can engage our kinaesthetic empathy, our felt understanding of others through the language of the body.
Our bodies store experience and experience moves within, through and between us. Feelings, thoughts and ideas emerge, and we express them in the world, through our words and our movements and gestures. And our bodies also express them without us being fully aware of it, through our somatic and visceral states. And I think about what connects us to ourselves and to each other, of what it is to be alive and animated by life force that makes us part of streams off living experience, not just dots of light and algorithms.