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Wayne McGregor: Mind in Motion

7 minute read
LUKE JENNINGS/LONDON

Choreography is a mysterious process. It happens in upstairs rooms and behind closed doors, and the pronouncements of choreographers are often opaque. “You have to put things together like a gefilte fish,” said George Balanchine, co-founder of New York City Ballet and the most influential dance maker of the 20th century.

The British choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose credits include Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as well as groundbreaking new works for dance, theater and opera companies, is keen to throw open the doors of those upstairs rooms. “A choreographer is someone who’s engaged with physical thinking,” he says. “Someone who’s applying the technology of the body to concepts and philosophies.”

McGregor, 37, belongs to a generation of choreographers who take ideas, rather than music, as their starting point, and are more interested in presenting audiences with an intellectual challenge — “disrupting their expectations,” as McGregor puts it — than entertaining them in the traditional fashion. This isn’t new in itself; what’s new is the arrival of conceptual work in the dance establishment’s mainstream. McGregor’s Chroma, a starkly beautiful piece set in a minimalist box of white light, was the popular hit of the 2006-07 Royal Ballet season at London’s Covent Garden, and led to his being appointed the Royal’s resident choreographer — a radical evolution given that he has no formal classical-dance training. Other McGregor pieces are now in the repertoires of the Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and Stuttgart Ballet companies.

McGregor’s most challenging material, however, has been reserved for his own London-based troupe, Wayne McGregor Random Dance. Founded in 1992, Random astounds audiences with the sheer strangeness of his vision. A computer buff from an early age, McGregor has used Poser software (originally designed for gamers) to generate movement, and incorporated ideas like algorithms and cognitive mapping into his work. In Sulphur 16 (1998), his dancers performed among spectral computer-generated figures, as if in a human-scale chess game. In Nemesis (2002), inspired in part by insect behavior, his dancers dueled with prosthetic steel arm extensions to a soundtrack incorporating mobile-phone conversations.

In these marriages of dance and technology McGregor says he seeks to “disrupt the spaces in which the body performs.” By presenting the human form in a new and alien way, he wants audiences to see it through new eyes, and to understand its possibilities. Some have found the work unsettling. “You meet Wayne and he’s the nicest guy,” says former Royal Ballet star Darcey Bussell. “And then you see the steps and think: Hey, this is not so nice.”

McGregor’s latest work for Random is Entity, opening at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre on April 10 and then touring France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and the U.S. In an airy studio above the theater in London, the piece is in rehearsal. As the 10 Random dancers watch, McGregor launches himself into a jagged, off-center turn. The dancers copy the move and add it to the existing sequence, a jolting series of leaps and ricochets. The result looks raw, but when he doubles the dancers into pairs and counts them in at one-second intervals, the effect is galvanizing. Energy flickers from performer to performer like fork lightning.

McGregor’s dance background was multifaceted. Growing up in the north of England, he was a fan of John Travolta films, and took classes in disco and ballroom. At 15, he shifted to contemporary dance, studying in Leeds and New York City. Tall but fast, and endowed with a bonelessly flexible physique, he was a performer you didn’t forget, and when he founded Random at the age of 22, he passed on his distinctive style to his dancers.

Entity is the third panel in a triptych of pieces examining the relationship between the brain and the creative processes involved in dance. In 2002, McGregor’s fascination with this topic led him to set up a research project entitled Choreography and Cognition with a team of five neuroscientists; the project was backed by a fellowship at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University. The first product of this research was AtaXia (2004), named after the disabling physical condition. Partly inspired by a real ataxia sufferer, the piece examined the frailty of the brain-body connection. By forcing breakdowns of coordination in his dancers, McGregor hoped to gain an insight into the relationship between their physical and cognitive functions. To this end he submitted the dancers to “perturbations,” assigning them tasks like counting backwards while dancing, and making them wear prisms over their eyes to distort their spatial awareness.

Amu, which followed in 2005, was a meditation on the function and symbolism of the heart, performed to a choral score by British composer Sir John Tavener, himself suffering from degenerative heart disease. McGregor and the Random dancers had their own hearts scanned and he even sat in on open-heart surgery. “I fainted,” he admits ruefully.

Entity continues these physical explorations. The piece was born of the Cognition and Choreography group’s search for what team member Scott deLahunta calls “an artificially intelligent choreographic entity.” A piece of software, in other words, that could “think” for itself and provide choreographers with new options for physical expression. It’s an “out-on-the-horizon” notion, admits DeLahunta, who studies the intersection between art and science at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. But it’s a technological dream that McGregor is energetically chasing. “We’ve got people working on software who understand the algorithms and engineering of artificial intelligence,” says DeLahunta. “We hope to have something ready by 2010.”

The relationship between this theoretical work and the dance that comes out of it is not always direct, but each feeds the other. By immersing himself in research, McGregor says, he is able to walk into the studio, surrender to “the visceral thrill of moving,” and create from instinct. Dance breaks down if it’s overloaded with theory, but it’s the physical rush of the choreography that you take away from a McGregor performance — the mesh of high-speed detail, the interplay between the lyrical and the neurotic, the steely calligraphy of the limbs. Few choreographers make more extreme physical and mental demands on their dancers. “He likes brave people who have a willingness to try, and aren’t precious,” says Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson, who performed in Chroma. “Afterward you feel like your brain’s been rewired.” Jessica Wright, a dancer with Random, knows this sensation well: “Some of the work is mind-boggling. I love it. He’s asking us to be thinking dancers, not just bodies.”

When McGregor started work on Chroma in 2006, he had just finished directing Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas at La Scala in Milan. At the same time, New York choreographer Mark Morris had been directing another Purcell opera at London’s Coliseum Theatre. Commissions like these illustrate the regard in which the world’s top choreographers are held. Until very recently, choreographers were subcontracted to set the steps of the ballets that were traditionally inserted into operas, but never consulted as to wider direction. “The thinking had already been done,” says McGregor. “You were just there for the coloring-in. Now, choreographers are directing operas. We’re inventing the conceptual scaffolding.”

McGregor is the most versatile of conceptual scaffolders, embracing film, education, site-specific installation, technology and dance. But his first commitment is to the cutting edge of performance. “How can we use the body to understand who we are?” he asks. Entity doesn’t provide all the answers, but its profound strangeness speaks eloquently of the passion with which he embraces the question.

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