Word: mcgregor
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...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...
...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...