Word: mcgregor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...