We sat down for an exclusive interview with Alexander Whitley about Alexander Whitley Dance Company’s new double bill The Rite of Spring / Mirror.
This show runs from Wednesday 18 – Saturday 21 March 2026.
Tickets are available at https://www.sadlerswells.com/
In The Rite of Spring / Mirror, how are you using AI and motion capture to challenge what audiences think dance can express about human agency?
We’re using motion capture and AI-driven visual systems to place the dancers in dialogue with digital mirror forms—3D avatars and AI-generated imagery that respond to and are shaped by the dancers’ movements.
Although these digital elements are always rooted in what the performers are doing, they produce variations and reflections of that movement. In a sense, they mimic the dancers, but in ways that can also constrain them. The work explores the tension created by this relationship: a space where human action is continuously mirrored and replicated by technology.
The narrative reflects an idea explored by Shannon Vallor in The AI Mirror: that AI largely reflects historical data—things humans have already done or imagined—whereas humans are what she calls “auto-fabricators,” constantly imagining and constructing new futures. When we increasingly rely on AI to make decisions for us or define who we are, we risk limiting that imaginative agency.
Through the choreography and digital environment, the piece stages a series of scenarios in which the human performer interacts with—and gradually becomes more dependent on—something that ultimately reflects only a shallow image of themselves.
What drew you to reimagining The Rite of Spring at this particular moment in our relationship with technology?
We’re living through a moment when AI is rapidly transforming how we work, think, and circulate knowledge. It feels like a genuine cultural and societal shift—a kind of rupture.
There’s also something symbolically powerful about the role technology is beginning to play in the world. Some people speak about AI in almost theological terms—as if it’s replacing older ideas of higher powers that govern our lives. That idea resonates strongly with The Rite of Spring, which centres on a community performing sacrificial dances in relation to forces they believe control their fate.
Stravinsky’s music is saturated with tension—fear, reverence, and awe—and these emotional currents speak strongly to the kind of uneasy relationship we have with powerful systems that shape our world.
The original work was also created at a moment of profound social change, just before the First World War, when industrialisation and mechanised warfare were reshaping society. You can hear something of that in the music—the violent rhythms, the almost mechanical drive of the score.
In that sense, The Rite of Spring already contains a deep anxiety about humanity’s relationship with the technologies shaping its future. Reimagining it through the lens of AI feels like a natural continuation of that conversation.
How does premiering this work at Sadler’s Wells East influence the scale and ambition of your choreography?
Knowing the work will premiere at Sadler’s Wells East certainly influences how we think about scale and the design of the production. It’s an exciting context for the piece, and it encourages us to imagine how the choreography and visual world can expand to fill a large theatrical space like this.
At the same time, our productions tour widely, so the work needs to remain flexible and adaptable across different venue sizes.
The technology plays an important role in that. Through projection and digital imagery, we’re able to extend the presence of the dancers beyond the physical bodies on stage. Although the cast is relatively small—five dancers, which is modest for a Rite of Spring—the visual systems allow those performers to multiply and expand across the stage space.
In that sense, the choreography operates on both a human scale and a much larger visual one, allowing the piece to feel expansive while remaining intimate.
Through Mirror, inspired by The AI Mirror, what questions are you hoping audiences will ask themselves about their own connections with AI?
It’s such a vast subject that I’m not trying to offer a comprehensive statement about AI. Instead, I hope the piece creates a space where audiences can reflect on their own feelings and relationships with the technology.
The work approaches the subject through a very human lens—specifically, the dynamics of intimate relationships. It asks what happens when AI enters that space, represented here through digital avatars and imagery generated from the dancers’ movements.
One of the central questions is how our interactions with technology might be reshaping the way we relate to each other. The piece moves through different emotional states—what begins as playful experimentation with technology gradually becomes something more unsettling.
But ultimately, there is a hopeful note. Inspired by the conclusion of Vallor’s book, the work suggests that our relationship with these technologies is not predetermined. We still have the agency to shape both how we use them and how they develop.
At its core, the piece is an attempt to reaffirm the value of human-to-human connection in a world where technologies—particularly AI chatbots—are increasingly designed to mediate or even replace it.
Since founding Alexander Whitley Dance Company, how has your vision of blending digital technology and live performance evolved?
Over the twelve years since founding the company, it’s been a long and gradual learning process—often involving learning the hard way. Working with technology in performance can be complex and unpredictable, and many of the insights have come simply from trying things and discovering the challenges along the way.
You really have to dive in to understand the possibilities and limitations of different technologies. Over time we’ve learned more about the creative affordances of various digital systems and how they can contribute to different stages of the choreographic process.
While we continue to integrate technology into live performance, our work has increasingly explored how these tools can open up new forms of participation in dance. For example, interactive installations or virtual reality experiences allow audiences to step inside the world of the choreography rather than viewing it from a distance. In some cases, audiences can move within the environment and even influence how the performance unfolds.
I see these different forms of experience as complementary rather than competitive. Theatre performance, interactive work, and immersive digital formats each offer different ways for people to encounter movement and physical thinking.
Our work is also shaped by close collaborations—particularly with our creative technologist, Luca Biada. Over time, we’ve built a shared understanding of how these technologies can operate within a performance context and what’s required to integrate them into touring productions. Much of our development happens iteratively over long periods, gradually building the systems and tools needed to achieve the artistic outcomes we’re interested in.
Mirror is the first project where AI has played such a central role, and we’re still learning what it can offer choreographically—especially in relation to movement itself. It remains a big and open field of exploration.
When balancing raw physical movement with algorithmic systems on stage, what remains essential to keeping the work emotionally human?
My starting point has always been the physicality of dance. That raw human presence is fundamental, and it acts as an anchor when we introduce technological elements.
What’s important for me is that the digital systems remain connected to the performers. In our work, the visuals and projections are driven live by the dancers through real-time systems. That means the imagery you see is always rooted in what the performers are doing in the moment.
If the visuals were pre-recorded, the relationship would be very different—the dancers would effectively be serving the technology. By keeping the interaction live, we create a feedback loop where movement generates visual change and the dancers respond to what they see emerging around them.
This creates a genuine dialogue between human and machine, which mirrors the kinds of interactions we increasingly have with technologies in everyday life.
Even though digital systems can represent human bodies or movements, they remain fundamentally different from the experience of seeing a living person move. Presenting those two things side by side allows us to reflect on what makes human presence unique—what it is about watching another body move that resonates with us emotionally.
That contrast is essential to the work I’m interested in making: exploring what it means to be human in dialogue with the technological systems shaping the world around us.