Dance has always had a problem with evidence.

A painting stays. A book stays. A recording stays, more or less, until the format dies, the file corrupts, or the platform loses interest. Dance is harder. It happens in a body, in a room, under the pressure of time. Then it leaves through memory, photographs, reviews, rehearsal notes, phone clips, archives, and the people who insist they remember where they were standing when it happened.

That is the easy way to frame Dance Digital, Sadler’s Wells’ first dance film festival from Digital Stage & Studio: as a weekend about saving dance from disappearance.

Bia Oliveira does not quite accept that premise.

When I speak to her ahead of Dance Digital, she corrects the framing almost immediately. This is not simply dance moving into film, VR, AI, or digital platforms. The better question is what happens when dance and film are made together from the start.

A dance work made for the camera is not always a record of something that once happened on stage. It can be a work in itself: built through framing, distance, editing, rhythm, bodies, light, cut, screen, and the authority of where the viewer is allowed to look.

That distinction matters. Too much cultural anxiety around technology begins with loss. What gets flattened? What gets replaced? What becomes less human? These are real questions, but they are not the only questions. Oliveira wants to ask another one: what is gained?

For young choreographers, the camera is no longer a distant professional apparatus. It is in the hand, in the rehearsal room, on the phone, on TikTok, in the edit, in the upload, in the circulation. A generation of dancers has learned how to frame movement before ever being invited into a theatre. They know the angle. They know the crop. They know when a body reads and when it disappears.

Dance Digital received 415 submissions from 55 countries for its first edition. That number matters. It tells us something about the scale of the field, but also about access. Touring a dance work is expensive. Making and distributing a film is still hard, but it opens a different door. It lets artists without the right rooms, money, networks or touring infrastructure put work into the world.

That does not make the digital innocent. Oliveira is clear about that too. AI sits uneasily in the conversation. Some artists use it because they have no money for colour grading, editing support or technical labour. Others, especially younger artists, want nothing to do with it. The fear is not abstract. It is about craft, authorship, replacement, and the speed with which tools arrive before anyone has worked out what they cost.

Still, the strongest part of the conversation is not about AI. It is about control.

When a live performance is filmed, the viewer no longer chooses where to look. The camera chooses. The edit chooses. The choreographer, if they are properly involved, chooses again. In Oliveira’s words, editing can become a form of re-choreography. The work is not only being preserved. It is being remade.

For Litro’s Future Archives, that is the point. An archive is never neutral. It frames, selects, cuts, stores and omits. In dance, the frame is not just technical. It is artistic, ethical, commercial and bodily. The question is not whether digital dance can preserve the body. The question is what kind of body the frame creates.

I spoke with Bia Oliveira about Dance Digital, young filmmakers, AI, ownership, performance capture, Storm, and why the future of dance on screen depends less on novelty than on whether the work still has force.

Dance and film working together

Eric Akoto: I came into this thinking about Dance Digital not as a tech showcase, but as a question about performance, memory and what happens to dance when it moves through film, VR, AI or digital platforms. But you pushed back on that framing straight away.

Bia Oliveira: I would go a step beyond that, because Dance Digital is not dance moving into digital, or dance moving into film. It is dance and film working together.

With the films we are presenting, none of them are performance captures. They have not been made on a stage and then captured for film. The only exception would be DuEls, which we are presenting on Friday. Even there, some of that choreography had been created for the stage, but the choreographers recreated it for the space they were in, because it was filmed in a museum in Oslo, and also for the camera.

More and more choreographers are not creating for film as a way of preserving a memory. They are making a work in itself. Of course, it helps that it can then be preserved, as long as the format allows. We know formats change. A lot that was created for VHS has unfortunately been lost. But preservation is not necessarily where artists start from.

I would ask more about what is gained.

What is gained?

Eric Akoto: What is gained?

Bia Oliveira: More and more choreographers are working with the screen, and dance lends itself very well to the camera, to angles and to editing. Dance is often very precise. A lot of the time there is counting, rhythm, music, structure. There is already a logic there.

We now have a generation coming up of digital natives who are working with the camera from a very young age. However rudimentary the device might be, they already have the ability to frame their own dances. You can see it on TikTok. People learn very quickly what angles work, how they work, and the best way to convey what they want to say.

So we do not only talk about what is lost. We talk about what is gained.

It is not easy to create a choreographic work, present it and tour it. It is very expensive. You need connections. You need a way in. But some choreographers are finding a route through video and digital platforms.

Of course, there are many issues with the internet and AI, but one of the great positives is distribution. When we set out to do this, we had no idea how many film submissions we would get. Because FilmFreeway is a platform available almost everywhere, we put the festival there and, for the first edition, we received 415 submissions from 55 countries.

There is an opening there: in how people make work, and how they distribute it.

Young filmmakers to watch

Eric Akoto: Were there young filmmakers or choreographers in that group who stood out to you?

Bia Oliveira: We have several. On Sunday, we have one hour dedicated to the best films we received by young people up to the age of 21.

Two films really stood out. One is Return, by Saraï Martens and Maira Renee, from Belgium. The other is ROUTE [not every day, but almost], filmed on the streets of Salvador, Bahia, in Brazil, by Juá Leindecker and Flora Leles.

With Return, you can see the influence of choreographers such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, one of the biggest choreographers in the world, of course from Belgium. It is a very simple film, deceptively simple, very difficult to make, and very accomplished.

ROUTE has a very different energy. It is filmed in Salvador, and you feel the street, the place, the movement, the world around it.

The edit as choreography

Eric Akoto: Dance is often spoken about as something that disappears as soon as it happens. Does digital change that, or does it create a different kind of disappearance?

Bia Oliveira: I think it creates something different.

We work with many choreographers who absolutely hate having their work documented. When we document it, and by that I mean performance capture, they are very particular about how that work is edited. We completely understand that, because as they edit it, they are choreographing it all over again. They are dictating what they want the viewer to see.

If you are sitting in an audience, even if you are very close, you can choose what to look at. At times you might feel you can grasp the whole performance. But when a work is filmed and edited, the choreographer is choosing exactly what close-up goes where, and how the performance is presented.

A lot of the time, they will say they do not want it filmed because it is not the same. And it is true. It is not the same. Every time you are in a theatre, you are having a very different experience from watching something on a screen. That is a fact.

But when we talk about performance capture at Sadler’s Wells, what we have in mind is access. What about the people who cannot be there?

For the productions we produce ourselves, we try from the beginning to work with the choreographer. Often the editor will be someone they know, someone they have worked with before, and even the camera crew if possible. They work closely with the editor because it is about bringing their vision to the camera. It is also about recreating that piece through the editing.

Who owns the record?

Eric Akoto: That raises the question of ownership. Who owns the record of a digital dance work: the choreographer, the performer, the filmmaker, the institution, the audience, the platform?

Bia Oliveira: In our case, it varies, but it is always the people who make the work.

Usually there is a combination of choreographer and filmmaker. I should say from the beginning: we are a dance organisation. We support dance artists. We do not support filmmakers per se. There are organisations that do that. We support dance artists exploring digital and technology.

Every time an artist makes a work, they own the work. We license the work. That is the difference.

A lot of the time, ownership sits between the choreographer and the filmmaker. Even when we commission work, they tell us who owns it when we come up with the contract. They might say, this film belongs to these people. We include that in the contract and we license the work — sometimes for a month, sometimes for a week, sometimes for five years, sometimes in perpetuity. But we are still licensees. They are the licensors.

AI and the cost of making work

Eric Akoto: Where does AI become useful in dance, and where does it start to flatten or misunderstand the work?

Bia Oliveira: I think there are choreographers who work with AI very easily and use it as a tool, especially when it comes to work that is highly digital at its inception — VR installations, games and so on.

With film, AI can also be useful as a tool, not replacing the work of artists or technicians. Sometimes a filmmaker, or a choreographer working with a filmmaker, has absolutely no resources. We know people are using AI to edit, but that does not mean they are letting AI edit the film for them. A lot of the time they are getting tips on how something could work.

Colour grading is the easiest example. It is a very expensive skill. Many filmmakers and choreographers do not have the resources. They will say themselves that it does not look as good as if they had someone doing it, but they cannot pay them. So it creates issues.

But who are we to blame? A lot of artists are coming from a place of having no resources whatsoever. It can be a choice between making the film the way they can, or not making it at all. I understand where people are coming from. The whole issue with AI is very complex.

At the moment in dance, people do not feel they are at risk because we have not got to the point where AI can do a choreographer’s job, or a dancer’s job, or create incredible films. We had some AI submissions and they just did not work.

Of course, there is the fear that it could work pretty soon. That is why you see, at graduations and other events, whenever someone mentions AI, young people just boo completely. Interestingly, the younger the artists, the more they are telling us they do not work with AI. They do not want to work with AI. They do not want to know about it.

Not novelty, but quality

Eric Akoto: When you were shaping the programme, were you looking for technical innovation?

Bia Oliveira: I have to correct you there, because we were not looking at technical innovation at all.

We were looking for films that were engaging and had quality. By quality I mean the choreography, the performances, the cinematography, and so on. It is a combination of factors that makes a good film. Sometimes you have all of that and the film is still not engaging. So it had to be engaging.

We were astonished by the submissions from 55 countries, and we did want, as much as possible, to represent some of the countries we received submissions from.

But we did not choose the films ourselves. We had an external panel of experts: choreographers, directors of photography, academics who work with dance and film, and critics. A panel of eight people looked at all the films and made the selection for the programme. Then we had another panel of judges for the awards.

Storm, Jungle and choreography entering public culture

Eric Akoto: If someone thinks digital dance is mainly about screens and technology, what are they missing?

Bia Oliveira: They are missing the choreography.

I do not even think people really think that, because look at something like Storm. We are showing the video at the festival. It is a collaboration involving Damien Jalet’s choreography, Romain Gavras, Gener8ion and Yung Lean.

Members of my family in Brazil were sending me the video, saying, “Have you seen this? Isn’t it amazing?” It had clearly travelled far beyond the usual dance audience.

I was talking to Damien and said the video was remarkable. He said he had never seen so much press using the word choreography to talk about a music video.

And it is because the choreography makes the video. It is not just the dance at the end. It is all the interactions between the dancers, the crowd, the composition of the scene. Everything is choreographed, and people noticed.

When you think of videos by Jungle, people can watch those forever. Whenever a new video by them comes out, someone will come to me and ask, “Have you seen this? Do you know any of these dancers?” Yes, we do. We work with many of these dancers, and it is good that they are getting this other work as well.

So no, I do not see digital dance as mainly screens and technology. The choreography is what makes the image work.

Hinterlands and moving without knowing it

Eric Akoto: I am also due to speak with Rebecca Evans about Hinterlands. From your perspective, why does that work belong inside Dance Digital?

Bia Oliveira: Rebecca has been exploring digital work for quite a while now. It is not easy, because artists working in this country often depend on universities, higher education institutions, philanthropists, or sometimes big tech companies who might support them in one way or another.

Rebecca has been extremely resilient. She has been developing work for digital over a number of years.

Hinterlands is only for three people at a time, but there is a dancer with them. I do not want to spoil it for you — I think you have to be there — but what she creates for those audience members and participants is very carefully held. At first you are an audience member, and then you participate in the work.

She manages to create this creature and make you interact with it. You are moving without thinking about moving. You are thinking about the creature, about what is happening in front of you, and that gets you moving.

One of the most difficult things is to get people moving. People might think everyone just dances, but it is not easy. Especially inside a work of art, to get people not only moving but experiencing it, out of their usual habits and into another world — that is difficult to achieve.

The future archive of dance

The mistake is to think of digital dance as a compromise: the body reduced to a file, the room flattened into a screen, the live event turned into content. Sometimes that is exactly what happens. But Oliveira’s argument is more interesting because it refuses the easy panic.

The camera can reduce dance, but it can also create another space for it. The edit can distort a performance, but it can also become a second act of choreography. AI can cheapen craft, but it can also expose the conditions under which many artists are already working: with too little money, too little time, and too few routes into the official rooms.

Dance Digital is not asking whether technology can replace the body. The body is still the point. The better question is who controls the frame, who owns the work, and what kind of movement becomes possible when dance is made not only for the stage, but for the screen, the street, the phone, the archive and the people who could not be there.

In that sense, the future archive of dance may not be a vault at all. It may be a body in the frame, moving again.