Watch human dancers use light projection technology to play with floating pixels

It can’t be easy to use props in a dance performance — litter a stage with physical impediments and your dancers might crash into them as they twirl and pirouette. But French dance company Adrien M / Claire B has seen a way around this problem, using light projection technology to create fantastical shapes and images on stage, incorporeal forms with which the company’s dancers can interact without restricting their space.

In the company’s newest short video, Pixel, dancers interact with the illuminations, swirling suspended motes of light with their limbs, riding small wireframe hills across the stage, and using an umbrella to ward off a cascade of shining specks. A controlled hand carves a path through a wall of white dots, and a bright hoop makes a hole in spacetime as the light projection reacts to the physical movements of the dancers. The result is a captivating short that looks like it was filmed at the atomic scale inside a computer monitor.