Deepfake | JESS & MORGS at DanceEast ★★★★★

JESS & MORGS turn political evasion into a technically dazzling collision of dance, film and digital illusion

In Deepfake, award-winning director-choreographers Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple transform the carefully manufactured theatre of political communication into something exhilaratingly literal.

Set inside the acidic green of a television studio, the work places Kennedy Muntanga’s Prime Minister opposite Rebecca Bassett-Graham’s interrogating journalist Kate Fielding as a high-stakes interview begins to fracture. Familiar echoes of political rhetoric, evasions, repeated questions and phrases such as “recollections may vary” all accumulate into an absurdly recognisable language of media-trained performance.

Voiceover drives choreography of astonishing specificity. Quick-fire gestures are mapped almost syllable by syllable, physicalising charm, accusation, cooperation, entrapment and deflection. Bodies pivot, recoil and interrupt with the rhythm of argument; marrying sharp contemporary movement with an almost balletic technical rigour.

Marshall Stay’s role as Gimbal Operator Dancer is particularly ingenious. Camera and body move as one, tracking Muntanga and Bassett-Graham with extraordinary precision while live filmmaking becomes choreography in itself. Cathy Grealish, Dylan Springer and Tommi Sutton, meanwhile, appear as green-screen-suited figures, part ensemble, part human special effect, manipulating bodies, images and perspectives before our eyes.

What could easily become a technological gimmick instead feels remarkably seamless. Performers hit exact positions and eyelines as live feeds, lighting and green-screen imagery construct and dismantle competing realities around them. Even the dancers’ shadows thrown across the green walls acquire an expressive life of their own.

There is considerable humour in the absurdity, but beneath it sits a timely unease. Deepfake blurs contemporary dance, physical theatre, film and spoken text to probe political performance, artificial intelligence and an increasingly unstable relationship with what we see and believe.

JESS & MORGS reveal manipulation while simultaneously performing its mechanics in plain sight. Hypnotic, mischievous and technically virtuosic, Deepfake is as intellectually sharp as it is thrilling to watch.

DEEPFAKE is co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells Theatre and DanceEast, as a DanceEast Jerwood Commission and Jacob’s Pillow and the Joan B. Hunter New Work Commission. You can catch the show next at Saddlers Wells 1st – 3rd October 2026

https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/jess-morgs-deepfake/