To develop OPUS: The Next Stage, and this “new art form”, from a proof-of-concept platform into a fully realised production and delivery system – working with Birmingham Royal Ballet's principal dancers and Digital Producer, Tom Rogers, linked to two of BRB's most-loved seasonal productions: Nutcracker at Birmingham Hippodrome and Cinderella on tour across the UK.

The brief asked for experiences that could work in multiple modes simultaneously: location-triggered performances at specific venues, pieces accessible anywhere through the app, and content integrated into show programmes – extending the world of each production beyond the stage and into the lives of audiences before, during and after each performance.

Performance Development | Volumetric Capture | AR Platform Development | Audience Testing | Digital Production

We worked with BRB's principal dancers and Digital Producer to develop a series of OPUS performances drawn from both productions – choreographed specifically for the volumetric format rather than simply extracted from existing stage work. The performances were captured at the advanced immersive studios of CCIXR Portsmouth – using leading-edge volumetric capture infrastructure to produce performances of extraordinary presence, precision and three-dimensional depth.

The live OPUS app platform was developed with Four Door Productions – building on the MVP architecture from Chapter One and extending it into a fully functional, publicly deployable system capable of handling location-based triggering at venues, play-anywhere access for audiences at home or on the move, and integration with printed show posters and programmes through QR and AR activation.

Audiences at Birmingham Hippodrome and at touring Cinderella venues became the first members of the public to encounter BRB principal dancers as volumetric presences in real-world locations – holding their phones up in a theatre foyer or a town square and finding a dancer from the show performing at their feet, or at full height above them, or at the scale of a jewellery box figurine.

Audience response confirmed the experience as something genuinely new. One tester, Kieran, described it as “the most bizarre and brilliantly clever thing I've ever seen.”

We were subsequently invited to exhibit OPUS at the BEYOND Conference in Manchester and selected as an Alpha innovation exhibitor at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon.

The shift from prototype to production with a major performing arts organisation revealed the full complexity of what OPUS makes possible – and demands. Choreographing for volumetric capture is an excitingly new discipline: the camera captures everything, from every angle simultaneously, which changes what works and what doesn't in ways that experienced dancers and choreographers have to discover through the process itself. The collaboration with BRB's artists was as much a creative research programme as a production one.

The multi-mode delivery approach – location-triggered, play-anywhere and programme-integrated simultaneously – demonstrated something important about where volumetric performance sits in the ecosystem of a live touring production. It is not a replacement for the stage experience and not a recording of it. It is a new kind of encounter that exists alongside the live show, extending its world and its audience in ways that no previous technology has made possible.

The question of scale – what it means to encounter a principal dancer at the size of a figurine, at human scale, or larger than life – is one of the most creatively rich dimensions of the medium. Each scale produces a completely different emotional and aesthetic experience. Learning how to design for that range, and how to give audiences agency within it, is work that is still in progress.

Client: Self-initiated – funded by Creative Catalyst (Innovate UK)

TGA: Performance Development Direction, AR Platform Development, Audience Testing, Digital Production
Partners: Birmingham Royal Ballet (Performance Partner – principal dancers and Digital Producer), CCIXR Portsmouth (Volumetric Capture), Four Door Productions (Live OPUS App Development)

Exhibited: BEYOND Conference, Manchester, Web Summit Lisbon 2025