Choreographing the Invisible

Blanca Li and the expanding language of movement between stage, screen, and virtual worlds

There are artists who work within disciplines, and then there are those who quietly dissolve them. Blanca Li belongs unmistakably to the second category. Her career does not read like a linear trajectory through dance, theatre, and cinema, but rather like a continuous reconfiguration of what movement can mean when it is no longer contained by a single form.

Long before her name became associated with major cultural institutions and international collaborations, Li’s artistic grammar was already being rewritten in motion. At seventeen, she moved to New York to train with Martha Graham — a formative encounter not only with technique, but with a philosophy of the body as expressive architecture. It was there, in the intensity of Graham’s legacy, that she also encountered hip-hop, a language that would later become part of her own hybrid vocabulary. Even at that early stage, the boundaries between classical discipline and urban improvisation were already beginning to blur.

When she returned to Europe and founded her contemporary dance company in 1992, that sense of permeability became structural rather than exploratory. Her work did not seek to preserve purity of form, but to test its limits. Dance, for Li, was never confined to the stage. It was already drifting toward opera, fashion, film, and later, digital environments — each collaboration extending the logic of choreography beyond its traditional frame.

What distinguishes Li within the contemporary arts landscape is not simply her versatility, but her consistent refusal to separate mediums into hierarchies. In her universe, a ballet production, a cinematic project, and a musical collaboration are not parallel practices; they are variations of the same question: how does the body generate meaning in space, and how does that meaning transform when the space itself changes?

This question becomes even more explicit in her work across institutions and cultural platforms. As director of Teatros del Canal and later president of La Villette, Li operated not only as an artist, but as a cultural architect — someone shaping the conditions under which performance could be imagined, produced, and experienced. These roles did not mark a departure from creation, but an expansion of it into infrastructure itself.

Yet it is in her recent ventures into digital and immersive formats that her artistic language finds its most radical extension. Le Bal de Paris, awarded Best VR Experience at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, redefined choreography as a participatory environment rather than a fixed composition. Viewers were no longer spectators but embodied participants, moving through a virtual space where narrative, costume, and gesture were inseparable. In this context, choreography ceases to describe movement on stage and becomes the design of experience itself.

With L’Ombre, presented at IRCAM and selected in competition at Venice in 2025, Li continued this exploration of mixed reality, where sound, image, and physical presence intersect in unstable configurations. The work does not ask how technology can represent dance, but how it can alter the conditions under which movement is perceived — how presence can be multiplied, fragmented, or displaced without losing its emotional charge.

Across these projects, a coherent artistic tension emerges: a sustained negotiation between material body and immaterial space. Li’s choreography does not attempt to stabilise this tension. It inhabits it. The result is a practice that feels less like performance in the traditional sense, and more like a continuous recalibration of perception.

Her election to the Academy of Fine Arts in 2019 marked institutional recognition of a career that had already long operated across institutional boundaries. But even that acknowledgment seems secondary to the broader logic of her work, which consistently resists final definition. Awards, positions, and retrospectives do not conclude her trajectory; they simply add new layers to a practice that is always in transit.

What is perhaps most striking in retrospect is how early this sensibility was already present. The encounter with Martha Graham established discipline, but not limitation. Hip-hop introduced rupture, but not opposition. From the beginning, Li’s artistic identity was built not on choosing between traditions, but on allowing them to coexist in productive instability.

Today, as she develops an ambitious virtual cultural platform, that trajectory appears less like evolution and more like logical continuation. The question is no longer how dance adapts to new media, but how new media reorganises what dance can be. In this expanded field, choreography becomes less about arranging bodies in space than about designing the conditions under which presence itself can be experienced.

There is a quiet consistency running through all of Li’s work: a belief that movement is not confined to physical gesture. It can be infrastructural, immersive, virtual. It can inhabit a stage, a screen, or a simulated environment without losing its core sensitivity to rhythm, relation, and attention.

In a contemporary cultural landscape increasingly defined by hybridisation, Blanca Li does not simply participate in convergence — she embodies it as method. Her work suggests that the future of choreography may not lie in preserving its borders, but in accepting their disappearance.

And perhaps that is her most enduring proposition: that movement, once freed from its traditional anchors, does not become less precise — only more difficult to contain.