If you have seen Thom Yorke’s spazzy dance to Lotus Flower or the fight sequences in Harry Potter’s Goblets of Fire then you already know something of the choreography of Wayne McGregor.
The weirdness of the Yorke video is what first directed me to McGregor and hence to his Random Dance company. I am now officially a big fan after seeing an hour-long performance by ten Random dancers as part of this year’s Ravenna Festival.
Entity is a marvellously inventive piece of action theatre and the ideas that lie behind the work are equally fascinating.
The project evolved from McGregor’s interest in cognitive science and its relationship with “the technology of the body”.
Specifically he consulted scientists to try to gain a deeper understanding what happens in the brain during the non verbal communication that lies at the heart of creating a new dance work. In other words, he wanted to understand the process of choreography more fully from a cognitive perspective.
In his short essay ‘The Beauty In Science’ (which was published in the programme for the show at Ravenna) McGregor wrote of the popular “myth that creativity is a magic alchemy and the very nature of understanding it, especially scientifically, will ultimately inhibit its fragile spell”.
This romantic belief of the creative process as something purely instinctive is why people are drawn to the stream of consciousness approach to art, be it improvised music, dance or writing. This leads to a misguided notion that we can somehow trick the brain to function independently, spontaneously and without inhibition.
It’s interesting that McGregor counters these ideas with a quote from Stravinsky who argued that it is actually by imposing constraints on our thoughts and actions that we free the self. This reminded me of what D.H. Lawrence wrote about the paradox of freedom: “Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing”.
In translating these ideas into creating a piece of dance theatre, McGregor seems intent of challenging conventional ideas of beauty in movement. He ‘re-wires’ the neurological impulses of his dancers to encourage a radically different approach to the way they use their bodies and interact with others.
In Entity, the five males and five females show breathtaking flexibility, strength and agility. There is nothing of the graceful perfection you expect from classical works but there is still a grace and a perfection about the jerky, at times almost awkward movements.
The fluidity of the interactions are mesmerizing and it is the unpredictability which gives the work its dynamism. The combinations of the dancers are not stereotypical – the man-on-man sequences are particularly charged and erotic without being overtly sexual, far removed from crude dry humping you see on the majority of MTV dance videos.
The performance begins and ends with film of a greyhound running, part of Eadweard Muybridge’s film archive on the study of animal locomotion from the early 20th century and the spectacle is enhanced by two superb instrumental musical scores that offer contrasting yet complimentary styles.
Joby Talbot is more classical in origin, using loops of cello refrains while Jon Hopkins’ Insides is a harder work that moves from elegant electro-ambience to thrusting techno.
Everything works for a kind of harmonious disharmony.
Related link:
The Beauty in Science by Wayne McGregor (Peak Performances.org)
