Word: randomized
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...Cinderella teams, is a consistent reminder that life has an inexorable chaotic streak, and that there is no way to perfectly divine the future, regardless of how much knowledge and expertise one brings to bear. While we often look back and presume that outcomes were foreseeable, in many circumstances random chance simply has more influence than reason can account for. Take, for example, Russell Pleasant, who beat out more than 3 million other brackets to win ESPN’s $10,000 prize for the highest score in 2006. When asked how he knew to pick heavy underdog George Mason...