German premiere

A desert landscape in glaring sunlight reaches to infinity. Five avatars are facing each other on sandy ground. Virtual hands grasp hands of flesh and blood. What is real? And what is unreal? The dance piece »VR_I« by the Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin is a mix of performance and a 3D-film in which five audience members can submerge at once.

The levels meld: The desert suddenly ends in a city landscape or in a hut on the summit of a mountain. Equipped with VR-glasses, the audience can move freely in the real space and interact with dancers of the virtual world. Thus, dance can be experienced in a new and different way. For the first time, a choreographer is combining dance with virtual reality technology.

Gilles Jobin, born in Lausanne in 1964, lives and works in Geneva. He studied classical dance in Cannes and Geneva. In 1993, he became the co-director of the Théâtre de l’Usine, Geneva; later, he was named house choreographer at the Théâtre Arsenic in Lausanne. After ten years as a dancer in Madrid (1995) and London (1997), he started choreographing and founded his own company that now belongs to one of the leading dance groups in Switzerland. In 2016, he shot the 3D-film »WOMB«. For »VR_I«, he received the Grand Prix for the most innovative work as well as the audience prize at the Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC), Explore, 2017 in Montréal.