Two decades ago, I stepped into a rehearsal room with Phoenix Dance Theatre, computer under my arm, and my life changed. Last Thursday, in a twist of fate, I found myself back in their company. Our new collaboration, underscored by the same counterpoint between movement and technology that first set me on this path, marked a big step towards my ambition of reviving a lost work: Urdance, my late brother’s work for synthesiser and orchestra.

Recent motion-capture session with Phoenix Dance Theatre, January 2025. Photo: Ben Price

To say ‘my life changed’ at that moment twenty years ago may sound like hyperbole. It seemed then—as it still does now—extraordinary that the unlikely convergence of dance and technology would mark the beginning of a new creative path, one that led me into filmmaking, interactive art, and eventually the founding of ViridianFX.

Back then, my colleague Tom Wexler and I had hit an impasse. We were making live visuals for music shows (both for live tours and TV shows (the Brit Awards, Smash!Hits, etc). While the work was exciting, the aesthetic was limited. ‘Bigger’ and ‘brighter’ were the usual rallying calls, and narrative was a non-starter (this last perhaps being no bad thing after the ‘concept’ albums of the ’70s!).

Still, we wanted to ‘stretch’ ourselves and work in more theatrical environments, and so, with no introduction, we approached Darshan Singh Bhuller, then artistic director of Phoenix, showed him our work, and asked him if he’d entertain the idea of a collaboration.

Extraordinarily, he said ‘yes’. The resulting work that we made together was called Eng-er-land. Essentially, a contemporary riff on Hogarth’s Gin Lane, it was intended as a throwaway piece in which the dancers, sandwiched between projections on a front gauze and rear cyclorama, depicted a riotous - but all too typical - English Friday evening ‘on the town’.

Whether it was the relative novelty of dancers working alongside kinetic digital scenery, the subject, or something more elusive, Eng-er-land proved to be a hit. So much so that, by the time the company arrived for the showpiece of their UK tour, two nights at London’s Sadler’s Wells, Eng-er-land had made its way up from a lighthearted opener of the programme, to a resounding showstopper that closed the evening.

This unexpected success not only reshaped Phoenix’s touring programme but also caught the attention of two key figures whose response to Eng-er-land would set my career on a new trajectory.

On the first night at Sadler’s Wells, in March 2005, the then Director of Digital at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Vivienne Gaskin, and a TV commercials director, Bill Clark were both in the audience. Viv (who later became the agent for KMA’s interactive work) invited us into a collaboration with the ICA and Tom Sapsford that led to Flock in Trafalgar Square and began an ongoing journey into large-scale interactive work in public spaces (www.kma.co.uk).

Meanwhile, Bill asked us to work with him on a series of forthcoming TV ads. We were open about our total absence of skills, but Bill’s belief in us was such that, not only did he ask us to work with him creating primitive visual effects for a series of ads, but when his first feature film, The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, was greenlit, he asked us to work on that too.

To suggest it was a simple progression from those nascent visual effects efforts to the development of Viridian FX would be misleading, but without that first step, the company certainly wouldn’t be here.

Now, twenty years on, Viridian FX is the leading VFX house in the North of England. Alongside the main company, we have Motion (post-production picture finishing and sound) and Viridian Lab, which acts, at least in part, as our scout, attempting to look into the future and report back on what it sees coming over the hill. Alongside and interwoven with its role as company sentinel, Viridian Labs undertakes R&D into emerging technologies or simply ideas that excite us.

This ethos of experimentation is at the heart of Viridian Lab’s work today, so when Professors Helena Daffern and Gavin Kearney (University of York and Co-Directors of CoStar Live Lab) approached us to support the launch of Live Lab*, the connection felt almost inevitable.

Together with them, we agreed that the launch event should open with a short performance involving motion-capture and live visualisations that would showcase some of the possibilities that exist in the emerging space that exists between embodied performance and digital augmentation, and dance seemed the obvious performance discipline for our purposes.

For those of you who have read the preceding Urdance blogs, you will know that we (via Jack Wingad and our post-production arm, Motion) had already begun the process of transcribing and revoicing Urdance, and so, in need of music, I suggested the piece’s 2nd movement as an ideal accompaniment.

*Urdance*. First Performance, QEH, London, 1987.

This felt particularly apt as Urdance’s genesis and intention seemed so aligned with CoStar’s. Its premiere at The Queen Elizabeth Hall, in 1987, was sponsored by Yamaha as part of their centenary celebrations. Yamaha provided cutting-edge equipment to seamlessly blend the orchestra’s acoustic sound with amplification and Francis’s innovative use of their DX5 synthesizer.

In the original programme, Shigeru Sugiyama, then Yamaha’s European President and General Manager, praised Urdance as a boundary-pushing experiment in blending classical music with technology, reflecting Yamaha’s vision for the future of music.

A page-spread from the programme for *Urdance’s* premiere, 1987.

All of which felt to me like another pleasing echo across time. A piece written and performed as an experiment, one that explored the boundaries of orchestral music and technology, should see its first public reincarnation, almost forty years later, as part of the launch of a state-of-the-art research and development facility, developing cutting-edge technology solutions to revolutionise live performance experiences.

I sent Helena and Gavin the only recording I had of the piece, from a later live performance at The Guildhall School of Music in 1993. Thank God, they responded enthusiastically.

The resurrected second movement is now ready, thanks to the hard work and creative sensitivity of Jack Wingad, who, with invaluable help from the work’s original conductor, Richard Gonski, has brought it back to life, with an ambisonic mix to boot.

Jack Wingad and Richard Gonski working together on the recreation of *Urdance’s* 2nd Movement, 2025.

With Urdance in place, I reached out to Phoenix Dance Theatre to ask if they, now under the artistic directorship of Marcus Jarrell Willis, might be interested in joining the experiment. Another affirmative, another reverberation in the dialogue between the present and the past, and one more step, one that brings me back to my opening lines.

Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Artistic Director, Marcus Jarrell Willis, talks with dancers Aaron Chaplin & Dylan Springer, 2025. Photo: Ben Price

Last Thursday’s motion-capture session with Phoenix felt like a homecoming, yet it also marked new ground for Urdance. As I watched the motion-capture-suited dancers embody the music, I was intrigued by the intricate layers of material and immaterial information resonating within the studio. The dancers’ physicality offered a fresh interpretation of the music, while their incorporeal digital avatars, projected on a computer screen, hinted at other possibilities.

Dancer Dylan Springer being pepared for the motion capture session by XRStories, Jo Rees-Jones, 2025. Photo: Ben Price

Other possibilities: The motion capture from Thursday’s session is now in our hands, and the week ahead will be a rush to complete a visualisation for the piece (I’ll post another blog about the visuals in the coming days). A rush because the launch is looming on the 6th of February, almost twenty years to the day since the premiere of Eng-er-land.

I’m looking forward to it, both as a dialogue with my own past and its anniversaries and with Francis’s and his. Reviving Urdance is proving to be an emotional endeavour. It’s a project where each step, every decision — whether honouring the score or reinterpreting it — feels like a dialogue across time, a celebration of Francis’s restless, experimental spirit. As I prepare for the Live Lab launch, I find myself reflecting on how serendipity, collaboration, and experimentation have brought me to this moment. I hope these echoes from the past will suggest futures for Urdance that I can’t yet imagine.

* CoSTAR Live LAB is a state-of-the-art research and development facility for the UK’s creative industries, developing cutting-edge technology solutions to revolutionise live performance experiences, fuelling significant growth in the UK economy and job market. Live Lab is part of CoSTAR: Convergent screen technologies and performance in real time - a £75.6m national research and development network of laboratories that are developing new technology to maintain the UK’s world-leading position in gaming, TV, film, performance, and digital entertainment sectors.

Urdance - Part 4. Anniversaries

Reignite 3