NanoPlanet 

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NanoPlanet unfolds as a choreographic performance inside virtual reality. The audience is invited to step inside a single cancer cell and explore it as a vast, shifting landscape. The work transforms scientific data from a confocal micrograph—created by researchers at the Centre for Cancer Cell Reprogramming—into an immersive world of ridges, membranes, and cavities, where microscopic structures grow to human scale and the body becomes part of the terrain.

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The landscape itself performs. Its “rocky” surfaces are textured with close-up footage of Butoh dancers’ bodies—muscles, wrinkles, breath and tremors. Their movements are mapped across the environment, re-performing the functions and tensions of the cell itself. The result is a flickering, holographic “skin”—each pixel concealing a recognisably human gesture, visible only when you move closer.

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Inside this strange planet, choreography becomes both the structure and the experience of space. Wearing headsets, you move not as a spectator but as a performer within the work. Turning, pausing, leaning closer—each action alters perception and the rhythm of the world itself. Observation becomes participation; movement becomes a way of knowing. At times, this shared choreography unsettles the terrain, echoing the cancer cell’s fragile balance between growth and destruction. The dancers’ recorded movements and your live gestures merge into one continuous composition—a duet between the living and the virtual, between presence and image— where perception itself becomes a dance.

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Through this embodied encounter, NanoPlanet touches on the paradox of cancer: it is not something foreign but something generated within us, a natural yet malicious part of the body. The work asks: How does it feel to move through a landscape of your own biology? To inhabit something that is both you and not you? Can dance make visible what science abstracts into data?

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Merging performance, visual art, and biomedical imagery, NanoPlanet extends choreography beyond the physical stage into virtual space. It reimagines dance as a way of perceiving, sensing, and composing life at the edge between body and data.

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A VR experience 

Duration: 10 minutes slots

Concept and creation: Karolina Bieszczad-Stie & Patryk Lichota

VR development and sound design: Patryk Lichota

Dancers: Mushimaru Fujieda & Lee Mihee

Choreography: Karolina Bieszczad-Stie

Dance cinematography and colour grade: Stein Stie

Scientific Collaboration: Centre for Cancer Cell Reprogramming (University of Oslo)

Production: Butoh Encounters

Co-production: Black Box theatre, Oslo

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Premiere: March 2026 (TBC)

 

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