Towards a New Architecture
Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, UK, 2025VideoDiffusion AI, Audiovisual(TouchDesigner), Computer Vision System Track, Motion Capture, Brutalism, Collective Order
Overview
Towards a New Architecture is a live performance that combines contemporary dance with real-time AI-generated visuals. It explores how place is formed through bodies, movement, and shared experience. Developed with Neverland Space Theatre and choreographed by Jiarong Yu, the work premiered at Sadler's Wells Theatre as part of the Concrete Rain Asian Dance Festival in 2025. Eight dancers and a generative visual system shape the performance together: movement affects the visuals, while the visuals respond back to the dancers, creating an evolving exchange between body, image, and space.
Concept
The work begins from a bodily feeling often found in urban architecture, especially in Brutalist spaces such as London’s Barbican Centre: the sense of being both overwhelmed and supported. In these spaces, the body slows down, becomes heavier, and starts to sense distance and closeness differently. Rather than explaining this feeling as a fixed emotion, the piece treats it as a way of perceiving space. Place is understood as something made through repeated movement, labour, contact, and collective action. The dancers are moving parts within a shared spatial system. Through their actions, the space is occupied, felt, and continuously remade.
Method and Structure
The piece is developed through the Space Theatre choreographic method, which treats choreography as a form of spatial research. Dancers work as parts of a collective system, focusing on how bodies connect, support, separate, and adjust to one another. The real-time visual system becomes another layer of this process, making bodily relations visible and feeding back into how the dancers sense movement.
The performance unfolds through three connected states: rhythm, relation, and structure. It begins with short, repetitive, labour-like movements, where palms strike the body and scattered particles flicker in response to sound and movement energy. As the rhythm slows, dancers move into sustained contact — approaching, entangling, pushing away, and reconnecting. The visuals become thicker and more clay-like, shaped by body contours, distance, and relational change. In the final state, synchronised movement and weight-sharing create stable support structures between bodies. The visual environment becomes more solid and architectural, forming concrete-like geometries, clear edges, and structural lines.
Credits
Director & Choreographer: Jiarong Yu
Creative Company: Neverland Space Theatre
Rehearsal Director: James Shing Mu Cheng
Associate Choreographers: James Shing Mu Cheng (Group Section), Zhe Zhang (Duet Section)
Dancers: Mae Hill, Faith Ma, Zhe Zhang, Xiangning Fu, Yuting Liang, Theodora Papapostolou, Phoebe Hoyland, Jiarong Yu
Composer & Music Editor: Lois Qi
Interactive Visuals: Shangyu Li
AI-Driven Interactive Visuals: Yiqing Ivy Tian
Spatial Narrative: Jingyi Tong