When 2D Dance Meets 360° Landscapes (Part 2)

Dance, Music, Visual, and Sound Fusion, Blog 2: When 2D Dance Meets 360° Landscapes

diagram for interactive art exhibitions

In my last post, I introduced my experimental journey into 360 art — a fusion of music, immersive landscapes, and dance. Today I want to dig into one of the key creative questions:

👉 How can a 2D dance performance live inside a 360° world?

The Challenge of Two Dimensions in a Spherical World

When we watch a dance on stage or on film, we are used to a framed experience. The proscenium arch, the cinema screen, or even a YouTube window all tell us: this is the space of performance.

But in 360, there is no frame. The audience is surrounded, free to look wherever they like. This raises an intriguing puzzle:

  • How do you present choreography that relies on focus and direction inside an environment where attention can wander?

  • How do you place a 2D filmed dancer inside a 360° world without breaking the illusion?

Creative Possibilities

Rather than seeing this as a problem, I’ve started to view it as a new stagecraft. Some possibilities include:

🎥 Overlay projection — placing a 2D dancer as if they are projected inside the spherical environment, much like a ghostly figure on a landscape.

📱 Dual-screen experience — one screen immerses you in the 360° environment, while another device shows the dance in 2D. You experience both simultaneously, almost like holding a choreography in your hands while standing inside its set.

🩰 Choreography as contrast — embracing the difference: the fixed rectangular frame of the dancer against the endless fluidity of the 360° world. Instead of hiding the seam, highlighting it.

🎶 Music as the bridge — sound unites the two worlds. My compositions can weave between the immersive environment and the 2D dance, so the audience feels continuity even when the visual space shifts.

Lessons from Stage and Cinema

This isn’t entirely new. In theatre, directors have long experimented with staging that breaks the proscenium — actors appearing in aisles, or projections extending the set. In cinema, split screens and overlays play with perspective.

What 360 offers is the chance to take these ideas further, giving the audience agency to decide where to look, while the music and choreography guide their experience.

Why Limitations Can Spark Creativity

If my dancers cannot yet exist in 360 space as volumetric figures, then the very tension between 2D and 360 becomes the art. Constraint is often the mother of invention.

Just as in ballet, where strict form produces beauty, or in music composition, where rules of harmony give structure, the limitations of 360 technology might lead to something original — a hybrid art form that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

What’s Next?

In my next post, I’ll explore the question of accessibility: how people without VR headsets or multiple screens can still experience this work, and why keeping the door open to all audiences matters so deeply to me.

👉 This is Part 2 of my experimental art journey in 360. Read Part 1 https://www.iservalan.com/2025/08/dancing-with-landscapes-my-first-steps.html and stay tuned for Part 3, where I’ll focus on accessibility and inclusivity in immersive art.

Part 3 https://www.iservalan.com/2025/08/making-360-art-accessible-for-all-and.html
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Dancing with Landscapes: My First Steps into 360 Art (Part One)

Dancing with Landscapes: My First Steps into 360 Art

diagram for iServalan performance art

I’ve just taken my first classes with the Rambert Dance Company, exploring contemporary fusion, ballet, and even Bollywood movement. What surprised me most was how close this felt to my experience in music composition. Both disciplines start with structure, rhythm, and discipline — but it’s the moments of freedom, the unexpected improvisations, that create something alive.

Now I’m taking those ideas into a new experimental form: fusing dance, music, and immersive 360° landscapes.

Why 360?

Most people know 360 technology from gaming, VR headsets, or maybe museum tours. But at its heart, 360 isn’t about gadgets — it’s about perspective. Imagine standing inside a landscape rather than looking at it framed in a rectangle. You can turn your head and choose where to focus.

For me, this opens up new possibilities:

  • My music can envelop the listener.

  • My landscapes become immersive environments rather than backgrounds.

  • My dance can be placed in dialogue with the space, sometimes framed in 2D, sometimes appearing inside the sphere.

Dance and Music as Parallel Practices

When I practice cello or piano, I often begin with small, repetitive movements — scales, exercises, fragments. In dance, it is much the same: a plié, a turn, a shift of weight. These fragments grow into phrases, which grow into complete works.

Whether I’m composing music, learning a ballet sequence, or improvising in a 360 landscape, I’m engaging with the same process:

  • Structure (form, discipline, rhythm)

  • Expression (tone, gesture, dynamics)

  • Exploration (what happens if…?)

It feels like one continuous practice, expressed through different mediums.

Accessibility Matters

I don’t expect everyone to own a VR headset. That’s why my work will always have multiple entry points:

  • On YouTube, you can explore 360 on your phone or computer by dragging the screen.

  • The dance sequences will be presented in 2D as well, either as overlays or separate films.

  • In future, I’m curious about two-screen experiences: imagine holding your phone for dance while being immersed in the 360 landscape on another device.

This way, the work remains open to all — a philosophy that feels important in a world where technology can sometimes exclude as much as it inspires.

What’s Next?

This is just the beginning. In my next post, I’ll explore the challenge of combining 2D dance with 360° landscapes — and why limitations can actually spark creativity.

For now, I invite you to think of 360 not as a tech gimmick, but as a new stage, a new canvas, and a new kind of instrument. One where dance, music, and environment can finally move as one.

👉 This is Part 1 of my experimental art journey in 360. Follow along for Part 2, where I’ll dive deeper into the fusion of 2D and immersive movement.

https://www.iservalan.com/2025/08/when-2d-dance-meets-360-landscapes-part.html
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🎹 Mindful Music Meets Nature: The Power of Piano in Eco Films

Nature has its own rhythms — the rustle of leaves, the call of a bird, the ripple of water. When music is added thoughtfully, it doesn’t overwhelm these sounds but deepens our connection to them. Few instruments achieve this as gracefully as the piano. Its tones mirror the pulse of rivers, the rise and fall of wind, the spaciousness of open skies.

Pairing piano with nature films has become a growing practice in mindful media. Short, quiet clips with improvised music can transform a passing moment into something almost meditative.

🐞 Bug’s Eye View

Filmed in the East Sussex countryside, Bug’s Eye View is a weekly series of 60-second eco-aware shorts accompanied by improvised piano. From goats and chickens to damsel flies and froglets, each clip captures fleeting glimpses of rural life, designed as mindful “breathing spaces” for families and creatives worldwide.

🎼 The Science of Sound and Calm

Studies show that slow, improvised piano can lower stress levels and support focus. Combined with natural imagery, it creates a layered sensory experience that works almost like guided meditation. For children, it can spark curiosity about both music and the natural world.

🌍 Why Improvisation Matters

Unlike pre-written scores, improvised piano is reactive and alive. It mirrors the unpredictability of a frog leaping, a fly darting, or waves lapping against the shore. Each performance is unique, just as every moment in nature is unrepeatable.

🎧 Listen & Explore

“mindful music in eco films”


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Bug’s Eye View by Tale Teller Kids™ #nature #animals #country

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THE ART OF THE BOW ARM with Yizhak Schotten

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Mr Capricious by Tale Teller Club featuring iServalan



Mr Capricious 


 I saw you in the light

A warm and velvet rush

You were poetry in flight

I don’t know where you came from

You lit the darkness bright

You were fire in the night

Somewhere in the future

I saw a memory in time

You were danger in plain sight

I’ll make a deal with you my friend

Heaven sublime until the very end

Chorus

They call you Mr Capricious 

But you’re delectable and 

Oh so delicious 

But you won’t hear crying in a wild wind

You won’t hear him lying in a wild wind

And we won’t hear you dying in the wild winds



©2024 Sarnia de la Maré


Mr Capricious: Sound, Storm, and Survival

The new track Mr Capricious from iServalan is a work that resists traditional boundaries. Conceived first at the piano as a raw improvisation, the piece flows like a storm—unpredictable, dangerous, and strangely beautiful.

The piano accompaniment, later transcribed from an unscored improvisation, reveals an artist who rejects rigid verse–chorus grids. Instead, the score drifts through arpeggiated figures, fluid harmonic shifts, and elastic pacing. The effect is one of emotional weather: the listener is pulled into surges, pauses, and sudden flashes, mirroring the unpredictable turbulence of domestic power and control that underpins the song’s narrative.

Vocals take on the structural role, guiding the listener through shifting imagery—light, velvet, fire, memory, storm. Against this, the piano accompaniment becomes an unstable landscape: sometimes tender, sometimes threatening, always restless.

Lyrically, Mr Capricious inhabits the ambiguous territory between love, danger, and survival. The titular figure is both seductive and destructive, framed by refrains of the “wild wind” — a metaphor for both elemental chaos and the silencing effect of abuse. The interplay between beauty and menace lies at the heart of the track, making it both a personal confession and a universal warning.

For iServalan, improvisation is not an accident but a manifesto. In their own words, “I reject traditional structure in favour of feelings, emotions, fluid sensory experiences.” This refusal of convention creates music that is at once experimental and deeply human, a reminder that art can capture truths which fixed forms cannot.

With its cinematic video montage in progress — stitched from AI-generated fragments of fire, fog, masks, and storm — Mr Capricious arrives not just as a song, but as an atmosphere: a warning whispered through velvet, a memory carried on the wild wind.


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