Is Wayne McGregor losing control? AtaXia, his newest piece, takes its ideas from the neurological condition of the same name, which causes progressive loss of muscular co-ordination. For dancers, this is potentially risky territory to explore: mastery of movement is the foundation of their craft. Perhaps it’s riskier still for a choreographer like McGregor, whose work so often looks super-human, demanding superlative skills of balance and timing from his performers.
McGregor first appeared on the dance scene as a highly idiosyncratic soloist. In works such as Cyborg (1995), his elongated limbs swivelled in sockets and twisted about their joints in flurries of detailed movement, like antennae monitoring the space about his angular body. He looked like a hyperactive stick insect rendered in a 3-D modelling program. It was as if a human had mated with a computer animation to produce a mutant child – part man, part machine, all McGregor.
But his inimitable style was something of an obstacle for the early group pieces he made for Random, the company he founded in 1992: the dancers seemed like pale imitations of McGregor himself. But as he began to choreograph more – and to dance less – his eye sharpened alongside his choreographic style, and Random (resident at Sadler’s Wells Theatre since 2002) has since become one of Britain’s most successful and distinctive contemporary dance companies.
Though the dancers are no longer McGregor replicas, the company’s work is marked by a characteristically McGregor look and feel: it is full of extreme positions and abrupt contrasts; it is driven by a dynamo energy; and it frequently refers to digital technology and software, both explicitly and implicitly. Random’s super-fit and technically slick dancers tilt, twist and twitch through disjointed sequences of motion which keep changing direction and confounding expectations, and switch between high speed and slow motion (the middle ground is rarely McGregor territory). One critic aptly described the result as ‘elastic with kinks in it’.
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Many of McGregor’s pieces have highlighted particular aspects of technology in performance, whether it is video projection, digital and thermal imaging, or screen animation. But on a deeper level, he has used ideas from digital technology to stimulate his creative mind, for example by using Poser software (originally designed for gaming specialists) to generate movement, or by considering concepts such as coding/decoding, generative systems, algorithms and cognitive mapping. The choreographic results of these experiments can sometimes be flashy, but they are never less than compelling, and have won McGregor a large following and a lot of attention, as well as invitations to work with some high-profile repertory companies, including Rambert, the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet. Indeed McGregor’s work sits well in a modern ballet repertoire, for he shares with ballet technique a focus on the body as spatial anatomy, and a fixation with long, leggy extensions.
McGregor has been riding high for a while – so why now go against the grain and start investigating loss of control? In fact, his interest in ataxia is in many ways a logical continuation of his enduring interest in the appliance of science to the art of movement. Two years ago, he teamed up with researcher Scott deLahunta, who suggested exploring McGregor’s interest in artificial intelligence and neural nets through discussions with scientists in the field. Thus was initiated a project entitled Choreography and Cognition, to investiage how neural networks, sensory-motor and cognitive systems may inform the concepts and practices of choreography. Part two of that project took place last year, with deLahunta, McGregor, and company dancers working on an open-ended six-month research project with a group of five scientists, hosted by the department of experimental psychology in Cambridge.
Some of the material in AtaXia comes directly from those sessions, such as the experiments with ‘perturbations’, where the dancers’ actions are manipulated by distorting their perceptions (for example, by dancing with prisms over their eyes), or where one set of instructions interferes with another (such as performing a known sequence while simultaneously counting an arbitrary set of numbers). In this way, the participants were able to observe and experience how the body/mind reacts to and deals with tasks that it cannot adequately perform.
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Another important input came later in the choreographic process, from Sarah Seddon Jenner, a woman with ataxia who found out about the project through her pilates class. She attended rehearsals, and came up with some vivid imagery about what ataxia feels like, such as experiencing the world as ‘a moving target’. The phrase certainly sums up the experience of watching AtaXia: an overload of sensory information that you can’t keep up with. Knotty kicks and twists fire the stage like neural sparks; the dancers, in their glistening costumes, have nerves of steel. Perspex sheets hang down so that the stage action is doubled in faint ghostly images. Even when the dancers all lie motionless (giving them a much-needed rest), there’s a film projection of text and image fragments unspooling at breakneck speed. Michael Gordon’s riotously rude score (think American minimalism racked up to volume 11 and spiked with farty bass riffs) is a sensory ‘perturbation’, so attention-grabbingly loud and nerve-grating that it interferes with your ability to focus on the visuals.
The overall hyperstimulation may well suggest how it feels to be on the receiving end of too much information to process – but after a while it can feel as if McGregor’s theme is less ataxia than attention deficit disorder. Which is one reason why a central duet for Khamlane Halsackda and Laila Diallo makes such a difference – just two people on stage, at a pace you can register. The choreographic vocabulary becomes suddenly more interesting, as awkward angles and twists are allowed to remain awkward rather than smoothed into technical feats. The performers, too, seem more like personalities with conflicted inner lives, and you get the feeling that they have both made some of the movement and kept some of it for themselves.
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Diallo’s performance in particular made me realise that though Random’s dancers are no longer McGregor clones, McGregor’s highly disciplined choreography often treats them as more or less interchangeable – technically outstanding but individually indistinct – which is perhaps why his work is easy to admire but hard to love. AtaXia suggests not that McGregor is losing control, but that he may be loosening it – in which case the most interesting fruit of this project may be yet to come.
But the Choreography and Cognition project has another side, and that too promises to yield some fascinating results. McGregor was not only gathering his own material from the project, but he and the dancers were themselves subjects for the five experimental psychologists. They were investigating such questions as how an artist uses notes and sketches; how collaborators communicate; whether movements are made of perceivable units and if so, whether these perceptions are shared. The results of and responses to this project, from both artists and scientists, will be uploaded in early September at www.choreocog.net.
In the meantime, McGregor is bound to keep busy. Though his next piece for Random is not scheduled until autumn 2005, the company has a full international tour schedule, and McGregor himself is rarely idle. He’s made work not only for other dance companies, but has been involved in everything from theatre and opera productions to youth group performances. Recently he’s been working on the fourth Harry Potter film, helping to answer such imponderable questions as ‘how do giants walk?’ It’s easy to see how such a puzzle, with its combination of mechanics, make-believe and special effects, would appeal to McGregor’s very particular choreographic mind.