Venice Dance Biennale review – Wayne McGregor delivers sinners and shapeshifters

The British choreographer's programme includes beguiling digital dance created by Tobias Gremmler, a reckoning with desire from Rocio Molina and seven visions of vice

Leonora Carrington is a guiding spirit of the 2022 Venice Art Biennale, where the main exhibition borrows the title of her book for children, The Milk of Dreams. The great surrealist's untethered hybrid figures are also evoked in Tobias Gremmler's hypnotic digital artwork Fields (), shown as part of the Dance Biennale directed by Wayne McGregor. The festival's overall theme is boundary-less" and serves as a rebuttal of any parochial destiny for Brexitland dance as well as a reaffirmation of international collaboration and the merging of artforms with new technologies.

The shapeshifting virtual dancers that Gremmler has created for his scenographic installation are cast over parallel gauze screens. These looped sequences find wispy bodies slowly forming to give the briefest of solos, duets and group dances before dissolving within a swirl of motion that abstractly conjures twisting cords of sinew and flowing hair. As the energy builds, dissipates and resurges, it gradually comes to resemble a series of life cycles, one ethereal dance after another within a vortex of space and time.