Image description: Pepa Ubera, photographed by Noemie Reijnen.

Pepa Ubera is a deft builder of worlds: a choreographer, researcher and multidisciplinary artist whose work blurs performance, installation and immersive tech. This week she premieres The Machine of Horizontal Dreams at Sadler’s Wells East – an invitation to swap linear “growth” for collective care, cyclical time and embodied experience. Ubera’s track record speaks for itself: from Hayward Gallery, Barbican and South East Dance to Tate Modern’s Ten Days Six Nights, Sadler’s Wells Wild Card and the ICA, she has consistently expanded what choreography can hold – collaborating across generations and disciplines to make spaces where bodies, environments and ideas think together. As you read on, keep two anchoring prompts close: What is pleasure for you? What is progress for you? Let them shape how you meet the work – and perhaps how you meet the world.

“Progress is felt as a pulse in the body rather than a line on a clock” – when audiences enter The Machine of Horizontal Dreams, what will they actually feel or be invited to do?

When audiences enter The Machine of Horizontal Dreams, they will be invited to arrive as active participants, not as spectators. It is important to me that audiences tap into the potential of live art as a relational practice, one that allows them to feel part of a community, to recognise their context, their motivation, their need for connection. Could we use the performance space to practice being a human? To practice sensing the self, as well as practising cooperation and collaboration with others?

There are only a few seats in the space – no rows, no front, no hierarchy. These seats are not meant to be owned but shared. Throughout the hour, audiences will be gently invited to offer their seat to someone else, so the rest can rotate as an act of generosity.

Elders are especially welcomed – there will always be a seat reserved for them. Instead of a fixed stage, people enter a living environment that hums, breathes, and responds to their presence. Some may choose to lie down, others to walk slowly, to join a collective breath, or simply witness. The invitation is not to observe ‘progress’, but to sense it – as vibration, as fluctuation, as shared pulse.

The performance is not delivered to the audience; it emerges between us.

Film: Trailer for The Machine of Horizontal Dreams, 2025. Courtesy of Pepa Ubera.

You frame the environment as a collaborator. How did you prototype with light, sound, video and immersive tech so that the space “thinks back”, and what broke (usefully) along the way?

I work very closely with my collaborators. The work is complex, so from early on I created a detailed shared plan, a living document where each chapter of the Machine is described in depth. I map out how bodies, light, and visual textures speak to each other, and how each element influences the audience’s experience in terms of rhythm, attention and emotional states. This allows the performers, visual designers, and sound artists to understand the relational logic of the piece, rather than approaching their discipline in isolation.

In terms of technology, this year I was in residency at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham where I began testing different kinds of systems that could truly support the work. Through my enquiry, I realised that the technology I want to develop, one that listens and responds to bodies in meaningful, poetic ways, is a long-term project and this is just the beginning. It’s essential to me that when I work with technology, it doesn’t dominate or decorate the space but extends the practice. I don’t want tech for spectacle, I want it to act like another sensitive organism in the room. That takes time.

What broke usefully along the way was the assumption that we could “finish” the environment quickly or make it perfectly reactive from the start. Some systems over performed, others ignored us completely, and some collapsed under the complexity of live interaction. Those failures were clarifying – they showed us what needed more listening, more softness, or less control. They reminded us that a space that “thinks back” is not obedient. It requires reciprocity and patience, just like any other collaborator.

Image description: Photograph from research for ‘The Machine of Horizontal Dreams’.

The work grew with intergenerational community groups across the UK. What did those collaborators change in the piece that you couldn’t have anticipated in the studio?

When I work with communities, I don’t arrive with an idea of fixed outcomes – I arrive with questions. In this piece, the core questions were: What is pleasure for you? What is progress for you? How have these shaped your life? And do you want to reimagine them now?

This kind of process is fully emergent. I cannot – and would not want to – anticipate what people will bring. Working with elders, especially, reminded me of the struggles they have carried – struggles deeply connected to gender, care, labour and survival. Their efforts have shaped the futures and opportunities many of us now have as women and non-binary people today. That is why ecofeminism is so relevant to the project – it recognises that bodies, land, and systems of oppression are entangled, and that resistance and knowledge travel intergenerationally.

The younger generations have also been incredibly inspiring – the way they articulate their needs, boundaries and visions of progress and pleasure that include not just themselves but wider communities and ecosystems. Their clarity, imagination and refusal to separate personal wellbeing from collective and planetary care have shaped the piece in ways I couldn’t have scripted.

The way elders and younger people respond to the same provocation is so different, and that multiplicity has reshaped the work continuously. It doesn’t stay fixed – it keeps evolving as I tour and engage with new communities in different places.

I have mainly been working with groups of women and non-binary people across generations, and their stories have been incredibly inspiring – stories of care, migration, exhaustion, humour, mothering, resistance, illness, desire, joy. If you come to see the piece, you will hear their voices – literally in the sound design, and embodied through movement. They have changed not just what the work contains, but how it listens.

Image description: Pepa Ubera – The Machine of Horizontal Dreams

Ecofeminism, posthumanism, Adrienne Maree Brown – which ideas or practices from these worlds became concrete choreographic tools? (Starter-pack welcome!)

From Adrienne Maree Brown and Emergent Strategy:
● “Small is all.” We worked with micro-gestures: a fingertip grazing fabric, a tremor in the ribs, a long exhale, a twitch behind the knee. These tiny actions became portals – they shift the atmosphere without demanding spectacle. They let us sense change at the level of tissue, not timeline.

From Ecofeminism:
● We prioritise cyclical time over linear time. Movement doesn’t aim for climax or finish; it moves like tide, weather, breath. Effort rises and falls – nothing is final. That sits in opposition to a Western-progressive idea of “forward.”

● Working with elders made this even more present. Their stories of gendered struggle and survival carry knowledge about endurance, slowness, and repair. Their labour has shaped our futures as women and non-binary people – that recognition sits inside the choreography.

From Posthumanism:
● Distributed agency became a choreographic tool. No one leads all the time. Authority passes through bodies, light, floor, sound, silence. Sometimes the speaker is a performer; sometimes it’s a floorboard or a glitch in the video.

● The environment is not scenery – it’s a collaborator. We tested scores where sound “thinks back,” video dreams with the audience’s faces, and light responds to breath. Not every system worked – and the failures were useful. They showed us that for technology to be alive in the room, it has to be porous, not obedient.

Examples from the scores:
● Performers begin at the periphery with eyes closed, moving inward while speaking softly about pleasure and progress – not to the audience, but to themselves. The convergence of voice and body creates a shared field without performance mode.

● Movement is generated from the body’s systems – lymph, heart, lungs – not from shape or step.

● Transmission happens between bodies and the environment – purging, dreaming, listening through space. At times, performers track the audience and “read” their thoughts aloud, and the machine starts “loading dreams and memories.”

● Community members create images in collaboration with the performers. The piece evolves with each group – it will keep changing as it tours.

Starter Pack:
● Adrienne Maree Brown – “Emergent Strategy” (especially “small is all,” “change is constant,” and “never a failure, always a lesson”)

● Donna Haraway – “Staying with the Trouble”

● Maria Puig de la Bellacasa – “Matters of Care”

● Vandana Shiva – especially on cyclical time and extraction

● Val Plumwood – for thinking beyond human supremacy

These frameworks shape how we move, organise, speak, listen, and build worlds together in the room.

Image description: Pepa Ubera – The Machine of Horizontal Dreams

You talk about a “Landscape of Ontologies.” For a curious newcomer: what does that mean in practice for how we move, watch, and relate inside the installation?

A “landscape of ontologies” is simply a space where many worlds are allowed to coexist – and where your way of being becomes part of the choreography.

It means reality is not fixed – it’s constantly negotiated through relationships. In practice, that means:
● You are not separate from the space – you complete it.

● Watching is also participating.

● There is no single “right” way to behave – only ways of relating.

Image description: Pepa Ubera – The Machine of Horizontal Dreams

Site matters. How has the architecture and neighbourhood of Sadler’s Wells East (Stratford) shaped the work? And how would it morph in a museum, a school, or outdoors?

Stratford is layered – Olympic legacy, new towers, long-standing communities, cultural displacement. That tension between regeneration and erasure is palpable, and I want the piece to listen to that complexity rather than neutralise it. We’ve designed the machine to be porous, open to local rhythms, languages, interruptions.

If we staged it in a museum, it would become more archival and reflective. In a school, more playful and unruly. Outdoors, it would surrender to weather, birds, sounds and accidental audiences. The machine is not an object – it’s a set of relational protocols. It morphs according to who and where we are.

Care and access are threaded through the project. What design choices ensure different bodies, languages and attention spans can belong in the work?

We designed for multiple speeds, multiple entry points, and multiple ways of knowing. That means:
● You can stand, sit, lie down, wander, or close your eyes. All are valid.

● There’s spoken language, but also gesture, vibration, and silence.

● Some sections invite engagement; others allow quiet rest.

Image description: Pepa Ubera – The Machine of Horizontal Dreams

Zooming out to 2025: with climate grief, polarisation and platform fatigue in the air, what fresh social gesture does this piece offer? Where are you finding signals of hope right now?

The work offers slowness as resistance and collective dreaming as infrastructure. In an age where everything demands a reaction, I’m more interested in creating spaces for response. Spaces where not-knowing is allowed. Where rest is not passive but political.

My hope lives in gestures I’ve witnessed during this process: young people explaining the importance of their values, elders trying to understand the practice of sharing pronouns. Collaborators staying after rehearsal to get to know each other better. People who refuse productivity in favour of presence.

If you could change one commissioning or rehearsal norm in the UK today, what would you flip – and what would that unlock?

I would replace project-based urgency with relationship-based timelines. Instead of asking artists to deliver a “finished product” in six weeks, we should be resourcing duration, return, iteration. Art needs compost time. When people are not rushed, they take risks. When trust replaces pressure, audiences feel it.

What do you love most about London’s dance/performance ecology – and where do you glimpse those same qualities elsewhere?

London is wild in its hybridity. You can watch an underground rave, score a ballet, or a punk noise gig become a durational ritual. What I love most is the friction, disciplines rubbing against each other until something unexpected sparks.

I feel that same electricity in Madrid’s artistic scene, Berlin’s artist-led spaces, Santiago de Chile’s political dance scene, and Sydney’s improvisation collectives. Everywhere I go, I find the same hunger: not for perfection, but for connection.

Find Pepa Ubera at pepaubera.com

Pepa Ubera
The Machine of Horizontal Dreams
Sadler’s Wells East
16 – 18 October 2025
sadlerswells.com