Wayne McGregor: “Infinite Bodies” - Dance, Technology and the Future of the Human Body
Installation view of OMNI (2025) Wayne McGregor + Industrial Light & Magic. Part of Wayne McGregor Infinite Bodies exhibition at Somerset House. Photo by Ravi Deepres. Utilising ILM’s cutting-edge performance capture and simulation technologies, Rebecca Bassett-Graham and Salvatore De Simone —dancers of Company Wayne McGregor —are rendered in a vast, boundless plane. McGregor and ILM collaborated on ABBA Voyage in 2022.
Wayne McGregor thinks physically. The highly acclaimed British choreographer merges human bodies and the latest technologies into an experimental field within contemporary ballet. As resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet and with his own company, he engages with themes from the humanities and natural sciences, robotics, kinetics, and cognitive science, translating them into dance. This physical–technological research also takes the artist and his explorations beyond the theatre and, for example, recently into a contemporary art space, through which I would like to take a closer look at some of his experiments.
The exhibition Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies at Somerset House in London (30 October 2025–22 February 2026) became a moving space full of bodies, technology, light, and sound – a mirror of image and reflection in dance where digital algorithms and interactive technologies merge. McGregor weaved all these elements into a dazzling yet sensual dance of perception. The machine is not merely a tool, but becomes an equal partner: everything reacts, interacts, transforms. The body thinks the machine and the machine thinks the body, challenging one another. In Infinite Bodies, organic and digital forms merged into new corporealities. The exhibition allowed a glimpse of infinity; the boundary between biological and algorithmic body dissolves and emphasises the ongoing process of co-creation. McGregor stages this dialogue not as a menace, but as an invitation to explore hybrid forms of expression.
Sir Wayne McGregor. Photo by ©Pål Hansen
Two dancers, between them more than 10,000 LED lights which, through the reflections of the movements of the living bodies, form an additional entity, bringing a sculpture to life. People passing by in fleeting moments are united in a figure of light. Who is dancing here for, with, or against whom? The installation Future Self (2012), created in collaboration with Random International, embodies all these questions of the hybridity of human and machine, their interaction, and cautiously explores this field of tension on tiptoe.
Company Wayne McGregor (Salvatore De Simone and Jasiah Marshall) 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
No One is an Island (2021) powerfully shows the constant negotiation of action and reaction. In this installation, two dancers again perform with each other and with a robotic sculpture, exploring their complex relationships. It opens a space in which human sensibility and algorithmic precision meet and can seemingly learn from one another. Yet it unfortunately tips into a certain human kitsch when the dancers cast longing glances at the robot, which then rushes toward them on rails with its fifteen light bulbs, and the two dancers lie entwined beneath it.
Despite all its boundlessness, Infinite Bodies remained a very physical exhibition. Especially at a time when virtual exhibitions are becoming increasingly central and entirely new in-between worlds are being explored through art in digital space, Wayne McGregor offered a highly sensual experience at Somerset House. Not only visually but also acoustically, almost all the creations invited a bodily perception. The aural work Deepstaria Void (2025), for example, unfolded in a room bathed in red light with such a powerful “sonic dreamscape” that one felt the bass vibrating throughout the entire body.
The totality of these multisensory installations, working with technologies from robotics and AI to motion capture, allowed me to immerse myself in a world in which my body and my senses are expanded. Not only does the human shape the machine here, but – if one allows it – the machine also shapes the human. Not in a threatening way, but in a symbiotic curiosity about everything our generation can still discover.
Wayne McGregor ON THE OTHER EARTH, Company Wayne McGregor (Hannah Joseph, Kevin Beyer), London (2025), Photo ©Ravi Deepres. Wayne McGregor: On The Other Earth is the world’s first post-cinematic choreographic installation that evolves dance performance on an immersive screen with 3D-imagery within an enveloping, large-scale cylindrical architecture.