In 2016, a noisy battle broke out on the exclusive rights of an artist on a newly developed painting or coating, called Vantablack. Intended for engineering use, it was unique to absorb 99.965% of visible light and become known as “the darkest black”. The artist who claimed it was Anish Kapoor, based in London.
Kapoor, who wanted to deceive the eye with dense pigments and ultra brilliant surfaces, had concluded an exclusive agreement with the producer of Vantablack, then called Surrey Nanosystems, who rapped several artists. One particular, Stuart Semple, kept the dispute in life and in the newspapers for months, even inventing its own exclusive painting: pink pink.
Kapoor retaliated by publishing an image of his raised index, sprayed in pink paint. However, despite all this problem, it now seems that if the artist takes advantage of certain privileges, they only extend to the use of Vantablack in the visual arts.
This left the British choreographer, the Sir Wayne McGregor freshly experienced, free to exploit its unique properties in a new work for nine dancers, In depth. For performance, which has its first in the United Kingdom at Sadlers Wells on February 27, a coating known as Vantablack Vision will be applied to the back of the scene, creating the feeling of his business occurring in an Enck-Noir void.
McGregor was well aware of the use of Vantablack by Kapoor – the pair, apparently different from Kapoor and Semple, are friends. “Anish's magic of the work is the way he subverts what you think you can see,” says McGregor. The choreographer remembers the first Vantablack work at the Kapoor Foundation in Venice when it opened in 2022, which appeared as enormous empty and steep black forms inside the Palazzo.
In depth takes its name from a sort of jellyfish that lives in the depths of the ocean, and is a marvel so as to transform and self-reproduction. The dancers of McGregor are also known for their extraordinarily fluid rearrangements of the body and appear throughout the performance as a luminescent kinetic beings in the EncK-Noir vacuum. With all these choices, McGregor refers to our continuous fascination for deep space, the deep ocean and black holes, as well as what he calls “a long current project that examines the intelligence of the body” – all from DNA to our sensory and emotional capacities.
Meanwhile, the exceptional lighting design of Teresa Baumgarten sees the rebounded light from mirrors on the sides of the stage, which makes its source impossible to discern. The result is a sparkling mist of another world.
“Teresa works with an AI system that uses information from the dancers' moving bodies and returns it to the light,” explains McGregor. Artificial intelligence is also used in the creation of a sound landscape, through which a foley of acoustic sounds made by the Oscar -winning sound artist Nicolas Becker is continuously recomposed by the Bronze AI system, developed by the music producer Lexx.
The dancers of the company Wayne McGregor had to repeat in low light, then complete the darkness, to prepare for the conditions of performance in such complex conditions. Given for the first time during the main Montepellier Dance festival in summer, criticisms applauded the results. “This is a protean demonstration of technological virtuosity and human fragility,” said the New York Times. Kapoor has not yet commented.
- In depth is in Sadler Wells, from February 27 to March 2, 2025
