A British dance impresario in search of ideas

THE Wellcome Genome Campus, the Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute are unlikely places to find a choreographer at work. But such research hubs turn out to be a natural habitat for Wayne McGregor. For more than two decades, the British choreographer has been using dancers to explore cognition, mathematics, neuroscience, astronomy, even modernist literature. (“Woolf Works”, a recent award-winning triptych for the Royal Ballet, was based on three novels by Virginia Woolf.)

Mr McGregor’s distinctive work can do grandeur and it can do melancholy. It can do mischief and it can do heartbreak. But he always tackles big ideas head-on. Having his genome sequenced in order to turn the data into dance might sound strange. For Mr McGregor, it is a logical next step.

“Autobiography” will be unveiled at Sadler’s Wells in London later this year. It is a co-production with Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, the Edinburgh International Festival and Festspielhaus St Polten in Austria. Mr McGregor, who has been resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet since 2006 and is also an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells, regularly works with the Bolshoi and the New York City Ballet, as well as the Royal Danish, San Francisco and Paris Opera ballet companies. He has, in other words, his pick of the finest dancers from around the globe. But perhaps appropriately, for a subject so close to home, “Autobiography” is being brought to life by his own troupe, Company Wayne McGregor.

It is the first piece Mr McGregor has started to develop since moving his company into its spectacular new home in east London. On a balmy recent evening the still-boyish 46-year-old was brimming with enthusiasm. The vast, cathedral-like studio represents a landmark achievement for the previously itinerant company. First, there is the holistic (and rare) luxury of having everything under one roof: the dancers arrive early, use the gym, take a company warm-up class and move seamlessly into one of the three capacious studios to start work. Watching Mr McGregor in action as a choreographer is educative. Rather than dictate a move or a step, he works closely with the dancer’s body or “physical signature”, and communicates his ideas using a vocabulary of fluid physical gestures and expressive but non-linguistic noises—such as “shway” or “buuu”—that are all but unintelligible to the uninitiated, yet comprehensible to the company themselves.

Then there are the neighbours. The soaring white spaces of Studio Wayne McGregor are housed within Here East, a complex that measures 1.2m square feet (111,484 square metres). Built in the former press and broadcasting centre of the 2012 Olympics, it now plays host to start-ups and established companies from the worlds of science, technology and sport, as well as academe. It is unusual for an arts ensemble to sit cheek-by-jowl with such organisations, but the proximity serves Mr McGregor’s restless curiosity. It is, he says proudly, the most “technologically literate” building in Europe, and is already giving rise to new partnerships. The company recently finished filming his ballet “Atomos”, using the state-of-the-art studios of one of their housemates, BT Sport (and with the dancers sporting wearable technology developed by another). In the autumn, when University College London opens its new campus in the building, Mr McGregor will take part in a lecture series about architecture and robotics. And so on.

These are rich pickings for a man who has always placed unexpected collaboration at the centre of his artistic practice. Across ballet, modern dance, theatre, opera and video, Mr McGregor’s many co-conspirators include pop singers, composers, fashion designers, novelists—even wizards; Mr McGregor was the choreographer for the film of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”.

Eyebrows were raised when he was first appointed to the Royal Ballet: he had never had a day’s classical training in his life, and rather than insist on traditional ballet steps, he demands that his dancers contort themselves into improbable, sculptural shapes to achieve the breathtaking effects they do. But even the purists of Covent Garden have embraced Mr McGregor as a hero. He has transformed the energy of the company over the past decade, and the dancers revere him. Some Royal Ballet members have even chosen to spend the summer hanging out at Studio Wayne McGregor.

No wonder. The choreographer has long believed in “colliding different sorts of intelligence in one place”. Increasingly, academic research suggests that creative imagination is impossible without collaboration: such findings are being embraced by organisations such as Second Home, which offers cross-disciplinary co-working opportunities in London and Lisbon (and claims its businesses grow ten times faster as a result) or Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, whose international residency programme provides free space to creators across the arts, science and technology. Radically for London, a city where studio rents can run to £2,000 ($2,604) a week, Studio Wayne McGregor is offering free space for up to five weeks for around 25 artists a year, in exchange for working on local education and outreach projects. With creative artists being priced out of the capital every day, this idea offers an important opportunity for emerging artists, and also represents good news for dance’s future.

“Autobiography” will incorporate one of the hottest technologies of the moment: artificial intelligence. Mr McGregor is working with Google to explore how advanced machine learning can create a “living archive”, which mines all his choreographic steps, going back more than a quarter of a century, even to childhood, “to see what happens when a machine learns your choreography and how it may predict what happens next”. He is intrigued, he says, by the idea of an archive “as a living and breathing asset, one that incorporates the past but looks to the future”. It is hard to think of a better definition of Mr McGregor himself.