Image by Mira Loew – Pell Ensemble
Rebecca Evans / Pell Ensemble (GBR)
Hinterlands
Hinterlands is a 1:2:1 mixed reality headset experience on the speculative futures of human evolution. A dancer and a participant co-create a journey, where virtual layers move over the real world, and connections with yourself, the other and the environment can change.
Duration 23min.
Who is the one you wish to experience your work?
-Audiences new and experienced to headset experiences
-Those that like to move (anyway they would like)
-Ages 12+
-Dance audiences
-Digital audiences
-Speculative futures/scifi/fantasy audiences
Description of the work: What happens in it?
Inspired by microorganisms called extremophiles that live on the edge of habitability, in some of earth’s most inhospitable environments, Hinterlands is a mixed reality headset experience on the speculative futures of human evolution. Movement, spatial sound and mixed reality create a space that unfolds differently for you and the dancers. Through an invitation to move, you will explore our entanglement with the natural and digital world and possibilities for surviving, evolving and becoming.
Fixed points and end goals are in flux, the space continually transforms allowing for joyful coexistence. Teeming with life and ways of being yet to be discovered, entities appear, shift and change around you.
Looping, overlapping, migrating, moving, divining, separating, coalescing, sliding, growing…we discover nonlinear lifespans, time shaped by different ways of being. They are boundariless, the product of symbiosis leading to new technological ecologies that are more than human.
Wearing a headset you will see both the world around you and a mixed reality layer. At certain points, the performers movements affect the augmented layers through the use of a motion capture suit. The dancer and audience members navigate this space through a structured improvisation score. What has been created is a three-part experience over 23 minutes.
An experience that considers how extending participants’ kinesthetic and spatial awareness in MR changes their appreciation and connection to self, other and environment.
SYNOPSIS OF THREE SCENES:
Sensing
Audiences are gently introduced to ‘the entity; through an open and accessible invitation to move with the dancers. Simple AR elements of small, cellular globules move and float around the participant, following them and spawning at the location of their headset.
Listening
This scene takes audiences deeper into an MR world with spatial sound and AR elements that are triggered by your location in space. Audiences are motivated to explore the space on their own. ‘The entity’ is starting to take a more solid but still abstracted form in the space.
Encountering
The AR entity appears fully formed here. The dancers and entity move together through the use of live motion capture to control the AR entity you see in real time. It is an encounter with a future being.
TECH:
Hinterlands uses live motion capture streamed to headsets to move an AR non-humanoid entity in mixed reality using passthrough mode to multiple untethered Pico 4’s. This is a custom app and interactive system created for HINTERLANDS and to our knowledge is the first live performance experience of its kind.
How did you come to create this piece?
I have been a long time reader of sci fi and speculative futures including writing by Olga Ravn, Octavia Butler and Ursela Le Guin. This along with my fascination with extremophiles life cycles and ability to physically transform to survive deep thermal vents, inside of nuclear reactors and even space made me consider what if we were a networked entity of human, digital and extremophile that could take the forms we need to evolve, survive and communicate. It was also an attempt to decenter human intelligence, especially our believed superiority with the use of language, and consider other forms of knowing, including our own embodied knowledge. This leading to the potentiality of the coexistence between the whole body/mind system and the digital elements. As well as encompassing our current world on the cusp of transformation incorporating the convergence of the 4th industrial revolution and possible 6th mass extinction. A way to offer being human differently together and generate hope that is grounded in our own personal and physical connection to the environment around us.
What does one-to-one art bring to you as an artist?
In Hinterlands, each person shapes their own journey through movement and interaction. A one-to-one setting takes this even further, it offers a space where the experience becomes deeply personal and responsive. It lets us test and refine how the body and digital elements can meet in real time, adjusting to the needs, pace and presence of each individual.
Working 1:2:1 gives us a chance to slow down and listen. It values difference not as a challenge, but as something creative, something that shapes the work. This format supports our ongoing interest in designing experiences that are inclusive, open-ended, and made for many ways of sensing and being in the world. It’s a way to explore what care, co-creation and coexistence can look like when movement and technology meet one person at a time.
Greetings from you, the artist, to the visitors of the festival
Hello, I’m really happy to be sharing Hinterlands with you this year.
My practice explores the space between the human, the digital, and the natural world, asking how we might move, sense, and relate differently when these boundaries start to blur. At the heart of this is a belief in the body as a site of knowledge, connection, and potential change.
Whether you’re a dancer, a careworker, or simply curious, this fun, joyful and unique experience invites you to follow your own path and notice the subtle, discovering something unexpected about yourself and the systems you’re entangled with.
Looking forward to meeting you in the Hinterlands.
Rebecca Evans & Pell Ensemble / Hinterlands
Kehä Festival 17.-18.10.2025
Friday
16:15
17:00
17:45
18:30
19:15
20:00
Saturday
14:10
14:55
15:40
16:40 Kehä-Talk: Artists interviews and artworks. Rebecca Evans & Pell Ensemble
17:45
18:30
19:15
