If Vivisector had appeared at the Tate or the Serpentine galleries, it would be short-listed for prizes and given double-page reviews. This latest collaboration between choreographer Chris Haring and video artist Klaus Obermaier explores the physical and metaphorical possibilities of the human body. Within an hour, its four male dancers are flayed, deformed, transposed into luminous, jostling atoms and lent the serene radiance of classical statues.
The imagery in Vivisector is achieved by clever and mystifying technology. During much of the show, the four identically dressed performers function as blank canvasses upon which video and light effects are projected. So precisely do these projections remain within the contours of the men's bodies that they seem to change form and substance before our eyes. Some of these transformations attain a metaphysical poetry. There is a near-death sequence in which the men's bodies are anatomised into pixels of light which pulsate so fiercely that the dancers implode and disappear. And there is a section in which green and purple patterns bleed around their torsos then dissolve like rotting flesh.
The fact that these are real people, in real time and space, makes the quality of the illusion more visceral and magical than any computer-generated movie stunt. At moments the collaborators intensify the confusion between live and digital by superimposing treated film of the dancers onto their actual bodies, the fit so exact that we do not know if this is a live or fake performer.
Vivisector does not always make for satisfying dance theatre. The transitions from one effect to the next feel too measured, and the sections of flesh-and-blood dance, while in serenely sculptural contrast to the technological wizardry, are too slow. Haring's choreography is inevitably limited by having to confine the dancers to spaces where the projections can reach them.
But the climactic effects are extraordinary, and so, too, the realisation that this kind of experiment could change dance for ever. Once someone discovers how to impose similar effects on fast-moving bodies, choreography will enter a new dimension.
