In 2016, a noisy battle broke out over one artist’s exclusive rights to a newly developed paint, or coating, called Vantablack. Intended for use in engineering, it was unique for absorbing 99.965% of visible light, and become known as “the blackest black”. The artist who laid claim to it was the London-based Anish Kapoor.
Kapoor, who had longed tricked the eye with dense pigments and ultra shiny surfaces, had made the exclusive deal with Vantablack’s producer, then called Surrey NanoSystems, which enraged several artists. One in particular, Stuart Semple, kept the dispute alive and in the newspapers for months, even inventing his own exclusive paint: Pinkest Pink.
Kapoor retaliated by posting a picture of his raised index finger, doused in the pink paint. However, despite all this fuss, it now seems that while the artist does enjoy certain privileges, they extend only to the use of Vantablack in visual arts.
This has left the British choreographer, the freshly knighted Sir Wayne McGregor, free to exploit its unique properties in a new work for nine dancers, Deepstaria. For the performance, which has its UK premiere at Sadlers Wells on 27 February, a coating known as Vantablack Vision will be applied to the back of the stage, creating the sensation of his company performing in an ink-black void.
McGregor was well aware of Kapoor’s use of Vantablack—the pair, seemingly unlike Kapoor and Semple, are friends. “The magic of Anish’s work is how he subverts what you think you can see,” says McGregor. The choreographer recalls experiencing the first Vantablack works at Kapoor’s foundation in Venice when it opened in 2022, which appeared like huge voids and craggy black forms inside the palazzo.
Deepstaria takes its name from a species of jellyfish that lives in depths of the ocean, and is a wonder of shapeshifting and self-reconstitution. McGregor’s dancers are also known for their extraordinarily fluid rearrangements of the body, and appear throughout the performance as luminescent kinetic beings in the ink-black void. With all of these choices McGregor is referencing our ongoing fascination with deep space, the deep ocean, and black holes, as well what he calls “one long, on-going project that looks at the intelligence of the body”—everything from DNA to our sensory and emotional capabilities.
Meanwhile exceptional lighting design by Teresa Baumgarten sees light bounced from mirrors on the sides of the stage, making its source impossible to discern. The result is an otherworldly shimmering, shifting haze.
“Teresa works with an AI system that uses information from the dancers’ moving bodies and feeds it back into the light,” explains McGregor. Artificial intelligence is also used in the creation of a soundscape, through which a foley of acoustic sounds made by Oscar-winning sound artist Nicolas Becker is continually recomposed by the Bronze AI system, developed by music producer LEXX.
The dancers of Company Wayne McGregor had to rehearse in low light, and then complete darkness, to prepare for the conditions of performing in such complex conditions. First seen at the major festival Montepellier Danse in the summer, critics applauded the results. “It is a protean display of technological virtuosity and human fragility,” said the New York Times. Kapoor is yet to comment.
- Deepstaria is at Sadler Wells, 27 February to 2 March 2025
