Tesseract review – strap in for the shapeshifting worlds of Charles Atlas

Barbican, London
Inspired by a sci-fi novella, the artist teams up with Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener for a bracing dance experiment

A woman's face looms, very large and unnervingly close. She seems within touching distance, but it is an illusion, a 3D film that is the opening of artist Charles Atlas's latest work, Tesseract, created with choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener.

Atlas, the longtime collaborator of Merce Cunningham and Michael Clark, has been exploring ways of filming dance since the 1970s. While this piece opens with bodies that are hyperreal in their apparent three-dimensionality, Atlas has his sights set one better, the fourth dimension - a tesseract is the four-dimensional version of a cube. Inspired by a 1940s sci-fi novella, he has created a work of shifting dimensions and worlds, with the connection between dancers and audience, dancers and camera, and projections and performers constantly changing.