ENTITY Company Wayne McGregor (UK) TAPAC, November 29
As the lights come up, we see in the corner of a wide screen an old grainy film of a running dog, an iconic sample of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic research of animal locomotion in the mid-19th century. This reference to the iconic visual draws a clever connection between the two artists, a century and a half apart, passionately obsessed with decoding and mediating movement through a new prism to the public.
Wayne McGregor (48), one of the UK’s leading choreographers, was captivated as a child by John Travolta’s role of a macho teenager who conveyed values and norms with his suggestive dance in Grease. He spent a quarter of a century perusing his art as a cerebral product – trying to resolve the inherent tension between opposing approaches – instinct and intuition vis-à-vis preconception in choreographing, those primary building blocks of any artistic process.
With insatiable curiosity, McGregor confers regularly with artists of various media and scientists of various disciplines: economists, brain surgeons, philosophers and more.
About 10 years ago he premiered Entity with his former company Random Dance. He collaborated with celebrated musicians Jon Hopkins and Tobi Talbotas, as well as artificial intelligence scientists. On stage, his dancers dealt with his challenging performative notions, demanding compositions and rigid adherence to his theoretical notions that are interesting to watch.
Dancers’ efforts manifest themselves with totally controlled, detailed precision of complex interactions of “entities” – be it in single or plural form – rather than as free-spirited humans. Those ultra-sleek punctual dancers, who are strong, often treat their bodies aggressively, pushing them beyond their comfort zone, battling with the imperfection of their technique, adjusting anew to endless multi-directional positions in a world that defies over-styling.
As a result, they achieve one of the prime choreography’s targets – to explore ways of reaching an aspired singularity.
The totality approach helps make Entity extremely cohesive, with captivating abundant manifestations of its movement’s lexicon in each tiny fragment, which eventually contributed to the greater picture. One wonders if a machine could have offered new traits on the quirky side, such as a disproportional attention towards contrived palms positions, or the swayed walk, mostly for the men, composed of rolling hips, stuck out but and fluttering effeminate hand gestures. Both drew attention to the external surround of the dancing body.
At the end, profound dance is not about intricate forms or technique, it is in the rare moment when art work stimulates your brain and at the same time arouses inner excitement.