BEIRUT: Dance and flashy technology are becoming increasingly snug bedfellows. Soon to release his three-dimensional film “Pina,” a paean to the titular director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, director Wim Wenders opined at this year’s Berlin Film Festival that “3D is almost tailor-made for dance.

”London’s Royal Opera House apparently agrees. A team of tech-heads has begun experimenting with 3D recordings of ballet performances and there are plans for theatrical releases.

Fancy technology doesn’t only alter our ability to record the performing arts – it also lends choreographers the capacity to produce compelling new forms of live experience, as Australian dance company Chunky Move demonstrated Sunday evening.

Performing as part of the BIPOD festival (courtesy of the Australian embassy and the Council of Australian Arab Relations), Chunky Move brought their 2006 performance “Glow” to Masrah al-Madina.

Employing an infrared camera tracking system together with tailor-made software, “Glow” features a futuristic duet between human dancer and skeins of projected light. Sometimes trapped inside a luminous grid that shifted around her body, sometimes emitting flecks of light, the dancer’s movements created a continuously mutating array.

If you’ve seen Kylie Minogue’s music video for “Get Outta My Way,” you’ll have a very good idea what this looks like. Minogue’s interactive light show was designed by the self-same software developer, Frieder Weiss, who collaborated with Chunky Move artistic director Gideon Obarzanek on “Glow.”

Where Minogue’s video utilizes a veritable cast of thousands, Obarzanek deploys a lone dancer, who rolls and writhes on stage for an unremitting half-hour. Sunday’s 7 p.m. slot was danced by Kristy Ayre, while the later performance showcased the skills of Sara Black.

If “Glow” represents the future of dance, it doesn’t seem to be a happy one. Black embodied a character who was, by turns, panicked, afraid and freaked out. Emitting shrill cries, breathy wails and guttural bursts of nonsense speech, Black seemed to be a refugee from a dystopian future.

Video game bleeps, together with blasts of synth, dominated Luke Smiles and Ben Frost’s soundtrack, which periodically reached the kind of ear-splitting crescendo that accompanies cinematic science-fiction disasters.

The interactive light technology allowed Obarzanek to conjure a variety of claustrophobic scenarios. No matter how frantically Black writhed and folded, for example, she failed to escape a mutating polygon that rigidly circumscribed her body.

At another point, the dancer threw herself back and forth across the stage, but remained in what seemed to be the sights of a gun, a cross projected across her back.

At some particularly striking moments, the light array transformed Black into a creature that one would barely recognize as human. Crawling and writhing through narrow strips of white light, Black could have been a monster from a manga comic.

Despite the dystopian tone, there were pretty sequences. Lying on the stage, Black swept her arms and legs, leaving close-knit series of polygons in her wake, like a human Spirograph.

At one point her body left inky black smudges as she moved, like spillages of printing toner. These smudges took on a life of their own, pulsing like amoebas.

Chunky Move definitely have some pretty cool technology on their hands, but too often “Glow” felt like an excuse for gimmickry.

Described on Chunky Move’s website as a “choreographic essay,” perhaps “Glow” is merely intended as a testing ground for interaction between light and the dancer. Hitched to a performance with a little more depth, the technology has electrifying potential.

BIPOD continues later in the month. The Arab Dance Platform begins on April 20 with from Iraqi Bodies production “The Sleepers” at Theater Monnot. For further details, visit www.maqamat.org/bipod2011 or call 961 1 343 834.