Dance, Reframed

Chad Michael Hall invites audiences into the choreography using virtual reality

By Christine Byrd

Virtual reality technology gives audiences an entirely different vantage point to enjoy dance — and an active role within the experience. A new project from Chad Michael Hall, associate professor of dance at UC Irvine, turns viewers into co-creators. It’s a culmination of nearly two decades of innovative choreography that uses technology to make audiences part of dance performances. 

“We’re experimenting with 360-degree video and VR technologies to invent new modes of creation, new modes of presentation, and new modes of audience interactions and co-creation of digital dance art,” Hall said. 

Frames of Reference, his newest piece, gives audiences the opportunity to watch a live duet, then put on a VR headset and experience the performance from one of the dancers’ viewpoints, and finally watch a grid showing the unique journey each audience member took through the VR — looking up, down, left or right at different times within the dance. 

“You can show a bunch of people the same 360-degree dance, and they will each have the agency to create a unique experience through the virtual reality headset,” explained Hall. 

Giving the audience a dancer’s view can be a tricky balancing act — literally. Some choreography can cause motion-sickness for the audience member wearing the VR headset, so Hall experiments with the intensity and pace of his movements. 

“VR cameras simply aren’t designed for dance, and that raises so many interesting questions,” Hall said. “How do you frame the dancing image, how is the dancer moving through the frame, and how does that change in a 360-degree view?” 

Image: Chad Michael Hall.

Experimentation 

Hall has been experimenting with technology and dance since 2007, after walking through a security camera system display at Costco, seeing his movement from all different angles and directions on a series of screens. It gave him an idea. 

He bought the nine-camera system and designed MULTIPLEX, with dancers performing in front of projections showing their movements from a variety of different camera angles. The award-winning piece became a turning point in Hall’s career.

“That was the moment where I really embraced combining emerging video technologies with live dance and electronic musical scores,” Hall said. Since then, he’s incorporated not only video but smartphones, social media, custom-designed apps and now virtual reality into his work. 

Hall found his way to dance relatively late in life. He was 21, a former high school drum major who played the French horn, trumpet and saxophone and was touring internationally with his college choir, when he discovered the joy of dancing in the rave and underground club culture. 

“I could watch anybody do anything freestyle, and I could just pick it up and do it. I realized singing wasn't enough. I wanted to move to music, express myself with my whole body,” he said. 

Hall transferred to the dance program at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, where he could train in the foundations of dance and pursue choreography, and in 2004 earned an M.F.A. in choreography from The Ohio State University — where, ironically, he avoided the technology emphasis that the school offered.

Hall then danced professionally with BODY TRAFFIC and the Regina Klenjoski Dance Company and toured internationally with Diavolo before launching his career as a Southern California-based freelance choreographer and college instructor. 

Questioning Technology 

In 2011, Hall joined the Claire Trevor School of the Arts’ Department of Dance, where access to new resources further spurred his creativity. As smartphone addiction skyrocketed, he staged a full-length performance in the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL) in 2012, encouraging audience members to use their devices to interact with the dancers, post to social media, and shine their flashlights in the dark theater. 

”It’s like falling into a digital rabbit hole because the performance can’t happen without the audience being on their phones,” Hall said. “I’m asking if we really understand what’s happening to us as we lose ourselves in these online spaces — but I’m using the same technology we lose ourselves in to question it.” 

Hall created a second evening-length piece, INTERFACE 2.0: Public Figure, in 2014 with UC Irvine dancers, and then restaged it on his professional dance company, which toured with it in 2015. Collaborating with composers, choreographers and artists from the University of Illinois, Hall continued evolving the technology in his productions to include iPads, interactive digital cubes and a proprietary app. Audience votes and likes would determine which dancers on stage were projected larger than life on screens and even which duet would be performed next. In 2017’s Critical Mass, the concept reached a dramatic climax when a rush of Internet memes flooded the stage and the audience’s phone screens until everything crashed into silence and darkness — making its point. 

Image: Cast in Chad Michael Hall’s piece testing VR systems before the show. Photo by John Toenjes.

Pushing Boundaries 

At UCI Arts, Hall teaches dance, choreography and classes specifically related to movement and technology. He covers the dancer-camera relationship, including basics of framing shots, angles and camera movements. He also equips students with the skills to build attention-grabbing websites and edit dance reels to help market themselves in the highly competitive industry, just like he did when he first came to Southern California and built his reputation as a boundary-pushing choreographer. 

During COVID-19, Hall organized a series of screendance workshops for the American College Dance Association to help dancers across the country learn the basics of creating and recording dances intended for screens instead of stages. Following the success of that program, he created an annual screendance festival, which he directed for two years, and an ACDA Screendance Committee, which Hall remains actively involved in.

As Hall brings dancers to UC Irvine, he is simultaneously taking his work internationally. Frames of Reference, his three-part duet incorporating virtual reality, will be performed at the technology-forward Machol Shalem Dance House in Jerusalem in 2026. Like many of his creative projects over the last 15 years, it started with experimental performances in UCI’s Experimental Media Performance Lab, and received support from the school's Research & Innovation Grants — which helped him purchase equipment like VR headsets. 

“The dance studio becomes a creative laboratory,” Hall said. “UCI Arts is the creative incubator for these ideas — providing the resources, the people, the support to experiment with the creative process in dance utilizing digital technologies.”

To learn more about the Department of Dance, visit dance.arts.uci.edu.