Hong Kong’s skyline is the surprise star of celebrity choreographer Wayne McGregor’s new digital dance experiment. Grandly described as the “world’s first 3D 360-degree post-cinematic choreographic installation,” Wayne McGregor: On the Other Earth invites viewers to don 3D glasses before entering a huge cylindrical screen. Inside awaits an “embodied encounter” with a disorientating array of contorting bodies and vivid psychedelic scenes across three dimensions.
Currently at Tai Kwun until 2 August, the ambitious show arrives following its July 2025 world premiere at 19th International Festival of Contemporary Dance —the festival McGregor serves as artistic director of, staged as part of the Venice Biennial — and a four-month London run, staged in tandem with a blockbuster AI-inspired retrospective exhibition at Somerset House, which closed in February 2026.
The only recognisable physical location in the whole 57-minute journey is Hong Kong, that inexhaustibly captivating vista across Victoria Harbour evocatively employed as the backdrop to a daring set piece, performed by the Hong Kong Ballet (HKB) atop the twin helipads of The Peninsula hotel. The city surely earned this narratively conspicuous tip of the hat — McGregor’s work was developed specifically to showcase the potential of a new 3D stereoscope developed locally at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), following a HK$35 million grant.
One suspects the government paymasters are happy with the results. As a feat of art-tech wizardry, McGregor’s efforts have already been declared a success — also selected for the extended reality section of the Venice Film Festival, in August 2025, and awarded Best Dance Film at the UK’s National Dance Awards 2025. Although one might want to quibble if On the Other Earth should be considered a film at all. It offers an immersive perspective superior to cinema not just qualitatively, but quantitatively — asking the audience to completely reconsider how they experience the performative spectacle of dance.
Hong Kong’s starring role in Wayne McGregor’s On the Other Earth: a pair of dancers from the Hong Kong Ballet perform a pas a deux atop the helipad of The Peninsula Hotel.
A feast for the senses
On the Other Earth eases us into its sensory smorgasbord slowly, with a pair of sensually intertwined performers, a mythical Adam and Eve clad in sheer white on a plain black background. Perspectives shift dizzyingly, the dancers shrinking to tiny images, glimpsed in the distance, then towering giants leaning out of the screen. The challenge is simply to keep looking, deeply. “If you think about it, how much do you really look at someone in a day?” McGregor later asks mischievously. “Not a lot — even with a life partner.”
This personal space invasion plays out sporadically across the 13 chapters — multiplying pairs, trios and quartets of dancers appear repeated across the 360-degree, four-metre-tall canvas — identical human figures performing different movements simultaneously. The fluidity of perspective, the choice to gaze and wander where we choose, offers a freedom impossible in any theatre, where every seat carries a single vantage — not just unique, but unreplicable. The show offers “a choreographic invitation to keep selecting movement,” says McGregor.
The sense of intimacy is deliberately overpowering. Just as theatre is the art of unnaturally physical (over-) expression — a world without the cinematic close-up — dance is all about the outline and form of the body viewed stoically from afar. In McGregor’s make-believe we see the beads of sweat form, watch the muscles tense — an art form defined by elegant detachment reframed as a physical feat. “How beautiful is it just simply to see a body so huge?” gushes the British choreographer when we sit down for a one-on-one after the opening press preview. “How beautiful is it to see a body in miniature? Tiny, like a little Blade Runner holographic figure, but three-dimensional?”
Dancers from Studio Wayne McGregor feature in all the other scenes of On the Other Earth.
Art-tech titan
A fascination with the artistic applications of technology have been a hallmark of McGregor’s career, who manages to simultaneously dwell in the heart of the dance establishment while probing both rough and smooth edges of pop culture. A knighted OBE who has served as resident choreographer of London’s The Royal Ballet since 2006, he’s found time to make countless forays into Hollywood (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and pop music (Radiohead), and choreographed the avatars of the Abba Voyage 3D virtual concert residency. More recent experiments include working on stop-motion with George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and with Google on AISoma.
While a virtual dance encounter might never replace the thrill of the stage, it offers something “equally compelling,” says Septime Webre, artistic director of Hong Kong Ballet, which co-produced the work alongside HKBU and Studio Wayne McGregor. “The poetic nature of the human body is so much more evident than even when you see ballet in a theatre,” he adds.
Key to maintaining this intimacy is a strict audience cap: just 20 people are permitted in the eight-metre-wide space. Playing five times a day, six days a week, its total of 165 screenings can be seen by a maximum 3,300 people — the equivalent of just two sold out shows at Hong Kong Culture Centre’s Grand Theatre. Tickets cost HK$120 — significantly cheaper than the £28 (HK$289) charged for the London run.
Those looking for any sense of narrative might leave disappointed. The dense deep-space backgrounds flicker with starry constellations. Dancers appear washed in colour — first red, then blue and finally, in a primitive 60s yellow feedback trail. In the finale, Webre sees a reference to Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent cinema masterpiece Metropolis, a century-old comment on industrialisation and automation which chimes with today’s existential crisis over the roles of AI. On brand, McGregor refuses to be drawn on any meaning or message in what we’ve witnessed. “It’s not my responsibility to work out what you’re going to think about something,” he adds. “Concreteness is something that dance doesn’t do well. Dance does ambiguity well — it’s slipperiness.”
A virtual rendering of Hong Kong’s Monster Building features in Wayne McGregor’s On the Other Earth.
Hyping a Hong Kong helipad
Hong Kong’s star cameo comes midway. Suddenly, the 3D effect is turned to 11 as we find ourselves ascending vertiginously through the central courtyard of the Insta-famous Monster Building. We arrive in an eerily pixelated landscape, the distorted digital outline of The Peninsula’s helipad hovering like a space station. We float through exploding dancers frozen in motion — like the “bullet time” effect pioneered in The Matrix. Limbs and shrapnel scrape our eyelids — the most clear and effective use of this stereoscopic technology. Until, that is, we switch from sci-fi nerdom to verite realism, now in glaring daylight on the same sunlit helipad, watching a pair of performers locked in a powerful duet. Howling natural gusts visibly shake their poise, wrinkle their clothes, sway their hairdos — a front-row seat to a one-off site-specific installation on what was apparently the windiest day of the year.
But it’s not all real. The pas de deux appears identically in two places, on opposing sides of the screen. Slowly these images move closer, until the pair become one. McGregor compares the effect to looking at a Gerhard Richter painting: “This is a choreographic idea, right? Two things are moving in real time and they meet. That’s something you can’t easily do on stage, that this instrument allows you to do.”
It’s a beautiful, affecting segment which forms the emotional core of an otherwise willfully abstract work — although the performance didn’t quite meet the high standards of HKB’s artistic director. “I probably would have rehearsed the dancers a little bit more,” admits Webre, “because I could see a tiny bit of shakiness in the ballerina during one particular move — and the guy too.”
This scene and its sequel — a septet of dancers strutting a group routine on a calmer day — are the only to feature HKB dancers, filmed over a weeklong period in April 2024. It surely cannot be a coincidence that the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra recently used the same location for its promo clip loudly welcoming incoming music director, the 26-year-old Finn Tarmo Peltokoski, onboard for the 2026/27 season. (McGregor hasn’t seen the clip, but can’t believe the orchestra didn’t think to perform while they were up there.)
The only time we hear the dancers feet move in Wayne McGregor’s On the Other Earth is during an upside-down sequence filmed from the centre of London’s Roundhouse theatre.
How On the Other Earth happened
The idea of using the prized Peninsula location came from the same scientist who is behind the groundbreaking technology: Jeffrey Shaw, chair professor of the HKBU’s Academy of Visual Arts, and director of the university’s Visualisation Research Centre. Shaw has been exploring the use of immersive 3D environments for over three decades, but the big upgrade in this project is the use of a 26-million pixel 12K LED display, made possible following that meaty grant from the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Fund project.
Billed as the “world’s first 360-degree spatial experience platform,” the resulting contraption was dubbed nVis. With an estimated cost of HK$8 million, just two of these devices exist — a permanent set-up at HKBU and the mobile nVis which was shipped to Venice and London before arriving at Tai Kwun.
When the first of these inventions was up and running, Shaw demonstrated its potential to Webre, hoping he might be inspired to choreograph a piece. But, “I didn’t want to be the choreographer that bombed,” he admits, “and I knew it had to be a good work and not a novelty, it would have to be in the hands of a master.”
For Webre, it was a “no brainer” to instead call McGregor: the pair had previously collaborated when HKB presented McGregor’s award-winning Chroma in 2019, soon after Webre joined HKB following a 17-year tenure as artistic director of The Washington Ballet. The excitement was evidently infectious: within five days of receiving the call, McGregor arrived in Hong Kong, for what would be the first of many more visits.
That was in December 2023. A month later, HKB was rehearsing the Peninsula scenes. Meanwhile, performers from Studio Wayne McGregor were captured at iconic London theatres Sadler’s Wells and The Roundhouse — the latter featured in the memorable penultimate scene, shot from the centre of an empty theatre and, oddly projected upside down, underlining the impossibility of the audience’s perspective.
The whole piece was complete in just 17 months, with McGregor spending around three months in Hong Kong working on visualisations. Dancers from his company were also filmed at HKBU during their visit to present Deepstaria at Xiqu Centre in September 2024 — a boggling journey into the blackness of deep sea and deep space that McGregor credits as the initial inspiration for On the Other Earth. The local enthusiasm for that work followed the sold-out reception which greeted Tree of Codes in 2018, establishing McGregor’s name in the city.
Following these spectacles, it’s understandable that, when news of a fresh McGregor show in Hong Kong dropped, there was a degree of disappointment to some that it would not be a full stage work. Fear not; something is clearly in the works. Webre hints that he’s “itching” to present Woolf Works, McGregor’s award-winning contemporary ballet triptych channeling the stream-of-consciousness prose style of British modernist author Virginia Woolf.
McGregor is less ambiguous, making a firm promise: “Next year — we’ve got really great plans,” he adds. “I’m sure we’ll be announcing it pretty soon.”
Watch this space. And in the meantime, don’t pass up this chance to fire your synapses amid the dizzying deep space ride of On the Other Earth.
On the Other Earth runs at Tai Kwun until 2 August 2026. Click here for more information.