Collective Body review (Venice Immersive)

I’ve always been a self-conscious dancer, unable to fully embrace the spirit of that old line—”dance like nobody’s watching”—unless aided by prodigious amounts of narcotics. I did experience one exception recently, however, at Venice Immersive, where I joined three others to participate in the communal dance production Collective Body. I got jiggy with it, my body splitting into two selves: my smelly old physical world self and a dreamy, new, crystal-like digital avatar. According to the creators, each avatar is shaped by participants’ initial movements.

I made lots of circular motions with my arms and breaststroke-like rhythms, as if the air were water to part. Perhaps that’s why my avatar appeared light blue, flecked with white seafoam-like speckles. Dancing felt nice in VR—my limbs loosened, my feet lighter—but god knows what I looked like IRL. I expect the blackmail video to surface any day now.

Director: Sarah Silverblatt-Buser
Running time: 19 minutes
Experienced at: Venice Immersive 2025

Before the experience begins the group’s encouraged to relax, limber up, let our bodies guide us through the experience (these are perilous words for someone like me, with a proven ability to clear the dance floor). When it begins, we’re situated in a light-filled outdoors space, soon discovering that moving our hands creates streaks of light. In virtual reality this effect is, as they say, an oldie but a goodie, with an easy to understand appeal: light created by your hands can look pretty freakin’ magical— like Tinkerbell’s fairydust—and requires no consumption of psychotropic substances. 

It’s usually deployed as a gimmicky flourish, a brief burst of bling. Collective Body is the first production I’ve encountered that sustains this sensation, director Sarah Silverblatt stretching it into a satisfying and reasonably long (19 minute) experience. There’s lots of dancing involved, in slightly different environments, with a couple of twists added that extend the experience, well-timed to arrive at around the points when our attention might’ve waned. The first is the appearance of a mirrored projection of ourselves, in the form of our avatar, which creates a paradoxical effect: you’re dancing by yourself but you’re sort of dancing with someone (or something) else. 

The second, towards the end of the experience, is the visual introduction of another member of the group—again in avatar form—the others being unseen until this point. We’re prompted to lead or follow in dance; I clumsily switched between the two, but I’m sure my partner didn’t mind. They felt present in a most curious way: in the room with me, and, in the virtual space, glowing and electric, more like energy in human form than a person per se. When the experience concluded, three out of four of us took our headsets off, while one man remained inside, having a grand time, moving and flailing, feeling the virtual breeze.