UBIQUITY

Presentation

UBIQUITY was born out of Le Cinquième Mur, a three-year research process (2019-2023) led by Emmanuelle Raynaut, Isabelle Jonniaux and Maud Clavier within Chimères, the French Ministry of Culture's pilot programme for hybrid digital creation. It is the first full-length work to emerge from that research.
Digital tools are often felt today as isolating, and virtual reality especially so: a solitary medium, sealed off by the headset. UBIQUITY takes the opposite bet. On a single 360° stage, with no fixed front and no seating tiers, five dancers, a live DJ and 100 spectators share the same space and the same soundtrack. Among them, 26 spectators — the "seers" — put on VR headsets and enter three collapsed worlds: a skeleton city, an upended interior, a volcanic landscape. Built to turn hand and body movement into choreography, these worlds do not cut the seers off: the dancers act as "pathogenic agents", picking up their gestures, amplifying them, relaying them as visible dance for the whole room.
The headset itself becomes a mask, in the carnival tradition of losing one's identity to explore another. The piece progresses in waves of growing participation — five seers, then eight, then thirteen — as the music accelerates and the dance turns increasingly contagious, closing on a shared celebration where dancers, seers and audience merge into one body. A final video-mapped reveal, projected onto smoke, lets the 74 spectators who never wore a headset finally see what the seers lived through, before a short solo VR version is opened to anyone who wants to try it.
The project's premise is as political and sensory as it is technical: proving that an immersive technology designed for individual consumption can become an instrument of collective presence, when choreographers, dramaturgs and technologists build it together from the very start rather than adding it afterwards as a visual effect.

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