The Rite of Spring / Mirror review – glitchy Stravinsky and digital doppelgangers from Alexander Whitley

2026-03-19 - 11:29

Sadler’s Wells East, London Visual spectacle overwhelms the human drama in the choreographer’s tech-heavy double bill Technology can sometimes seem to take on its own life and sideline the people it is nominally assisting. That tension, even conflict, is the subject of Mirror, a new duet by Alexander Whitley, who has good form with choreographic deployments of digital, generative and VR technologies. In black and white leotards studded with motion-capture markers, Gabriel Ciulli and Daisy Dancer wind themselves into spirals and symmetries that veer from closeness to counter-pull and back again. This unstable yet interdependent dynamic is interrupted by an impersonal beam of light that scans the space, and gives rise to rectangles flickering on the front cloth, like so many screen frames – a portal for the appearance of luminous digital doppelgangers that first echo then upstage the dancers, who now turn their attention away from each other and towards their ghostly avatars. Continue reading...