I knew it was not real, and still my body believed it.

That was the first thing that stayed with me after experiencing Hinterlands at Sadler’s Wells. I had the headset on. I knew I was standing inside a constructed digital space. I knew the forms around me were not physically there in the ordinary sense. But that did not stop the body from reacting.

There was a small disorientation in it. Not panic, not spectacle, not the cheap shock of virtual reality doing something loud. Something quieter. The sense that the body had been asked to trust two worlds at once: the real room and the digital one laid over it.

That is what made the piece interesting. Hinterlands is not a work about technology replacing dance. It is about what happens when the live body, the digital image and the audience are all placed in the same unstable space.

Rebecca Evans, who created the work with Pell Ensemble, describes Hinterlands as an “in-between space”. The title has a geographical meaning, she says — the space between port, city and countryside — but it also points to something more internal: an unknown place within the self.

That is close to how the work feels. You are in the room, but not only in the room. You are watching a dancer, but also watching your own body decide how much of the digital world to accept. The work does not ask you to forget where you are. It makes you more aware of it.

Speaking to Litro, Evans reflected on mixed reality, speculative futures, the limits of documentation, and why digital dance may sometimes be even harder to preserve than live performance.

The starting point

Eric Akoto: Can you talk me through Hinterlands? What was the starting point, and what question were you trying to explore through the work?

Rebecca Evans: The title Hinterlands has a couple of different meanings. It has a geographical meaning, which is often the space between the port, the city and the countryside. So it is this kind of in-between space. It can also be referred to psychologically, as a space within ourselves that is maybe unknown.

I liked both of those meanings because you are within that space physically, but there is also this other world that is happening and maybe taking you into a place that is unknown within yourself, in your own physicality.

The concept was inspired by speculative futures. I was reading Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which has these encounters with entities where you never quite know what they are. They are described in different ways by different people.

I was interested in how we create an encounter with a future entity, and in decentring the human within the environment — not devaluing the human, but thinking about distributed agency. In Hinterlands, the audience, the digital elements and the live body all become part of that. No one person or thing is ever really the centre throughout the whole work. That shifts.

It is about the human, the digital and the nature relationship, and trying to move through many different forms of that within the work.

The meaning of Hinterlands

Eric Akoto: In the context of the piece, what does Hinterlands mean to you?

Rebecca Evans: We start the work by saying we are in the future. So we are in an in-between space.

With mixed reality, there is an importance in recognising the real world you are in because you cannot ignore it. We are at Sadler’s Wells. We are in this space. We are here now, but we are also in this future space through the work.

So Hinterlands is that in-between space. It is also worth recognising that there are colonial contexts to the word hinterlands, but I think there is something in that: sometimes disregarded knowledges and information sit inside that word too.

Within Hinterlands, we are trying to surface the knowledge of nature more prevalently in the space, and non-human intelligences. So the space also becomes slightly political.

And we bring all of our own bodies into that space. They do not disappear into an avatar or through another digital process.

What the body remembers

Eric Akoto: Dance disappears as it happens, but it can leave strong traces in the body and memory. How do you think about what survives after a performance is over?

Rebecca Evans: For me, the biggest impact is what I might call somatic echoes: what echoes for people within the body after the performance, and how those echoes get revisited.

Sometimes we have talked to audience members afterwards and they have described the space of the hinterlands within their body as somewhere they can revisit or draw from again. I find that really exciting.

That is not only within this work. I think it is true of live stage work as well as digital work: how do we engage and impact audiences emotionally, physically and in all those different ways? How do we leave them with something, and leave them feeling changed in some way?

The body and the data body

Eric Akoto: When dance moves into digital space — whether through film, archive, online documentation, VR or AI — what is most at risk of being lost?

Rebecca Evans: It depends on the work and what the aims of the work are. But whenever movement goes into a digital system, it is already abstracted.

Any kind of motion tracking, verbal description of the work or video is already taking the body and moving it into data. I do not think abstracted data can fully encompass embodied knowledge or somatic experience.

What is interesting for me is what in the body resists capture. How do you have a conversation between the data body and the real body? What becomes interesting in the space between those two?

There are things systems can capture: skeletal tracking, dynamics, space, choreographic elements of the external body. But there are also emotions and invisible forces, both in us and outside of us, that are not always captured by digital technologies.

For me, what is exciting is putting those things in conversation.

Why Sadler’s Wells matters

Eric Akoto: What role should an institution like Sadler’s Wells play in helping audiences understand live work after the original moment has passed?

Rebecca Evans: What was exciting was even our placement within the festival. We were adjacent to the cafe, and there was an open space where people could come in, see what was happening and ask questions.

There were conversations happening just from seeing a dancer and audience members in headsets all moving together. People were asking how it worked, what the experience was, whether they had seen this form of dance before.

So there is something important about exposing audiences to different forms of dance and different ways of experiencing it.

There is also a need to build a critical framework for audiences, specifically around digital dance. It was useful to have different VR works in the festival because it gives audiences a sense that there is a wide variety out there, and different approaches can be taken. Then they can start to build their own critical view of what they like and what they do not like.

There is also an opportunity, especially with new technologies and dance, to bring audiences into testing and iteration. How can audiences see how a work develops? How can they understand the stages of that? And how can they help inform the end product?

All of that feels relevant in terms of building future audiences.

What should be preserved?

Eric Akoto: When it comes to archiving dance, what should be preserved: the choreography, the performance, the rehearsal process, the notes, the audience response, even the bodies that carried it?

Rebecca Evans: I think that is different for each choreographer and for each piece.

For some choreographers, the archive might include how the work was organised. Wayne McGregor’s archive, for example, might preserve the Google Drives in which the work was organised, exactly as they were. So the relevant information is different in each case.

But I like the idea that it is not just the choreographer’s process. It might also be the dancer’s experience of the work, the audience’s experience of it, the end result, and as many entry points as possible.

That feels important.

Twenty years from now

Eric Akoto: If Hinterlands were encountered 20 years from now, what would you want someone to understand that might not be obvious from the recording alone?

Rebecca Evans: With Hinterlands, we are documenting both the inside-the-headset experience and the outside experience. But the headset recording is only one person’s view of the experience.

There are three different audience members, and they are all navigating their own pathways through it. It is an incredibly permissive score. People are released from being controllers for digital content. They have the choice to move how they wish through the piece and to frame the work how they wish.

That means each experience is completely different for each person, and that is very difficult to capture.

Watching something on screen is different from being completely immersed in it. In Hinterlands, you are surrounded by two other audience members, a dancer and digital content. There is also what might be called haptic visuality: even though the elements are only seen, you also have a sense of feeling those elements with the body.

Those things are not able to be captured fully.

There is another question too. In 20 years, I do not even know if this technology will work.

That is a really interesting thing with digital dance. Digital dance is not new — there has been work around this since the 1960s — but the technology itself often becomes unsustainable over a long period of time. There are forced updates. The work is built for a specific headset, a specific version of Unity, a specific system. If those update, the work may not operate as it did before.

Live dance is incredibly ephemeral, but it can often be reset year after year. With digital work, there is a challenge. It can sometimes become even more ephemeral because the technology may only last for five or ten years.

That is part of what makes the archive of digital dance so urgent. It is not only the body that disappears. The system that holds the work can disappear too.

The future archive of dance

The mistake is to think that digital technology simply solves dance’s archive problem. It does not. It gives the work new routes, new forms and new audiences, but it also creates new weaknesses.

A recording can show what one person saw. It cannot fully show what it felt like to be surrounded by other audience members, a live dancer and digital material. It cannot fully capture the moment when the body reacts to something the mind knows is not there.

That is what stayed with me after Hinterlands. Not the headset itself, but the strange authority of the body. You can know the world is constructed. You can know the image is not physically there. The body still negotiates with it.

That is where Evans’ work sits: between the body and the data body, between the archive and the thing that resists being archived, between a future imagined on screen and a body trying to find its balance in the room.

Some traces remain in files. Some remain in bodies. Some may be lost when the system updates.

Hinterlands does not pretend otherwise. It lets that instability become part of the work.