Monday’s Mentor: Wayne McGregor

After my classes with Davide last week, my curiosity spiked, I found myself looking to the depths of the internet to uncover more about the choreographer Wayne McGregor of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance. Here is is looking pensive:

[photo: Nick Mead]

The thing that strikes, and inspires, me most about McGregor is his obvious enthusiasm for what he does, and his tenacity engaging with dance from different angles. I think art is something that requires a consistent engagement – an artist would create a “lifestyle” over a “job” or “career”, and so developing abstract and unique levels of engagement with dance speaks to me as a way of integrating dance into learning in life.

After studying in both the UK and America (New York), McGregor began his company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance at the age of 22, and from the outset, created awe and interest regarding his way of moving. His long, lean, supple physique lends a peculiarity to his movement, developing a suppleness that is then rivaled by his ability to fracture it.

McGregor wowed audiences with a unique dance vocabulary, using, and collaborating with, technology in his works. Through altering the landscape with which his work can be viewed, McGregor creates a vehicle to transport his audiences into another artistic space. Technology not only has the ability to transform a stage, but one performance 53 Bytes (1997) was created to be performed simultaneously in Berlin and Canada, viewed through a live satellite link. McGregor has also experimented with internet streaming, hoping to reach a wider global audience and transform the nature of viewing a dance work.

This excerpt from his website demonstrates just a little more about his collaborative efforts between dance and science:

McGregor has always been as curious about the technology of the dancing body as he has been about machines. For example, the stimulus for AtaXia (created for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance in 2004) was provided by the Experimental Psychology department at Cambridge where McGregor, appointed Research fellow, was engaged in a study of body brain interaction. Dancers are the most expert co-ordinators of body-brain states yet here McGregor became fascinated by the energy and beauty of neurological dysfunction. For Amu (2005), McGregor continued his association with science by working with heart imaging specialists, alongside a typically prolific set of artistic collaborators, to question both the physical functions and symbolic resonances of the human heart. For Entity, (2008), McGregor began his enquiry into the creation of an autonomous choreographic agent, a project that is currently in pilot mode. For Dyad 1909 (2009), McGregor embarked on a study of creative cognition, with his entire creation process video-recorded and mapped by a team of Cognition scientists and students at the University of California, San Diego, USA. For FAR, (2010), McGregor fused cutting edge design (rAndom International) with choreography mined from a radical cognitive research process.

This curiously intense approach to assimilating scientific research with dance, I greatly admire. I’m very interested in both of these fields, and to see such a sound collaboration is encouraging. It can often seem that looking for inspiration means grazing the surface of something… looking only insofar as to encourage a spark of interest. McGregor is a case that defies this assumption and actively demonstrates how far a dancer’s fascination with the body can continue.

His explorations have not only brought him into new spaces outside the arts, he is a experienced collaborator within the arts also. Having worked on opera, movies, plays, musicals and art installations, McGregor’s creativity is anything but tied to one medium. One of his most recent movie choreographic projects was “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” insisting not on stage-experienced children, but everyday, primary school children to teach.

You can see some of his work and hear his ideas here:

I must admit, I’m greatly intrigued… McGregor has fascinated me, and I’m inspired by his approach…

“A great sexy beast of a piece – it’s like being licked by a panther’s juicy, rasping tongue while you’re revising maths.”
David Jays on Entity, Sunday Times, 2008

(sound delightful?)

(Added: (I found this wonderful article here… click for more inspiration!)