Last Updated on December 10, 2025
Somerset House Hosts Landmark Exhibition
3.0 out of 5.0 starsWayne McGregor, resident choreographer at The Royal Ballet since 2006, is best known as a dance-maker, the creator of more than 200 works for his own Company Wayne McGregor, and a wide range of dance companies the world over, who has developed his own contemporary choreographic language relying on the hyper-flexibility of seemingly boneless bodies.
In short, we know the work that, by age 55, has earned him a knighthood, CBE, and a variety of international honours, as dance performance; but that’s not really what Infinite Bodies, his landmark exhibition at Somerset House, is all about.
Instead, to get the measure of this display, you have to delve into McGregor’s other abiding passion: technology, its ongoing development and how it interacts with the human body. And to enjoy Infinite Bodies to the full, you have to be as dazzled by technology as McGregor himself is.
At the press presentation, Wayne McGregor said Infinite Bodies was the result of three decades of experimentation off the stage on physical intelligence, cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence; and he hoped that, as a result, visitors would leave Somerset House thinking differently about their own bodies.
Displayed in the Embankment Galleries of Somerset House, the exhibition consists primarily of a variety of weird and wonderful contraptions, accompanied by panels with detailed explanations of what they are technically, what they do and what they’re for.
Take AISOMA. It’s a choreographic tool developed by McGregor in collaboration with a team at Google Arts & Culture Lab, which has been trained on McGregor’s own archive. It detects poses from a live body in real time and then suggests new, original phrases that are rooted in McGregor’s own choreographic language. Visitors can try it for themselves, and I suspect this will prove one of the most popular sections of Infinite Bodies.
Elsewhere, dancers from Company Wayne McGregor pop up unannounced to interact with the technology in ways that can be quite hypnotic. In an early section, two dancers move either side of a brass grid comprising over 10,000 LED lights that reflect their movement, so that they communicate simultaneously with each other and with their own dotted reflections.
Large screens on three sides of a square room show high definition film documenting key moments from the life and output of Company Wayne McGregor since its creation in 1992; while in ‘Audience’, it’s viewers themselves who become the subject of a mechanical gaze, as a multitude of small, rectangular mirrors set on low pedestals on the floor swivel and turn offering fleeting reflections of the visitors.
In one mostly dark room, you can sit and listen to the product of Bronze AI, which, the information panel tells us, is “a digital audio engine that allows recorded music to become a unique and evolving life experience”. The sound is taken from the score for McGregor’s recent stage work Deepstaria, a composition designed by Invisible Mountains, and its evolution is actually quite transporting, otherworldly almost.
Very much the polymath, Wayne McGregor has collaborated with all manner of artists beyond the confines of dance. It was he who choreographed The ABBA Voyage, the extraordinary and hugely popular show in which amazingly realistic ABBA avatars recreate a gig by the Swedish band.
That was done with the use of ILM cutting-edge motion capture and simulation technology, and the same process is demonstrated in the very first room of the exhibition, where a curved screen shows the captured outlines of two bodies in motion.
Too vast for the confines of Somerset House is On The Other Earth, a section of the exhibition billed as ‘the world’s first post-cinematic choreographic installation’ on show at the Stone Nest.
Visitors are surrounded by a panoramic 360-degree cylindrical architecture created in collaboration with artists Ravi Deepres and Theresa Baumgartner, where dance, choreography, digital imaging, spatialised sound, and AI come together.
As the Director of the Somerset House Trust, Jonathan Reekie, stressed in his presentation, Infinite Bodies tallies with Somerset House’s ongoing project to look to the future through the intersection of culture, technology and society; so, Somerset House is putting on a full and diverse programme of events to accompany and complement the exhibition
I found Infinite Bodies interesting, but, not being a technology buff, it was quite hard work and, frankly, not as enlightening or life-changing as it purports to be. Granted, it is possible to just walk through, concentrate on the exhibits and ignore the lengthy, highly technical, didactic and a touch overbearing panels that accompany them; but McGregor as good as begged us to read and attempt to digest them, which I dutifully did with the result that I left with an overtaxed brain but, sadly, still no different awareness of my own body.
Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies is at Somerset House 30/10/25 to 22/02/26
On the Other Earth is at Stone Nest 30/10/25 5o 22/02/26
Somerset House
Strand
London WC2R 1LA
Stone Nest
136 Shaftesbury Avenue
London W1D 5EZ
Looking for something different? We also recommend the Gilbert & George Exhibition, currently showing at the Hayward Gallery
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