Chroma - 2006

By Emma Crichton-Miller.

One might not immediately associate the serene minimalist design of Pawson with the abrupt angular choreography of McGregor - as McGregor puts it, "Pawson has an amazing talent for takings things away whereas so much of my work is to do with adding things and disrupting things." But two years ago the two embarked on a shared experiment "to use space to offer the audience a completely new experience of movement." As McGregor puts it: "We have two different knowledge bases, but we share the same desire to offer the brain an opportunity to see movement freshly. Together we set out to create the space and the choreographic language to achieve this". Throughout McGregor's career, beneath the sometimes frenetic, sometimes lyrical surface of the dance there has been a research project of this kind, an ongoing inquiry into how movement makes meaning and how the choreographer, the dancer, the audience and indeed the designer are caught up together in that process. Since founding his company, Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, in 1992, these experimental forays have resulted in some of the most distinctive and daring new works in British choreography. His talisman has been a remark made to him by the great American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, "one of the hardest things to do in life is unlearn things". So McGregor sets out characteristically to disconcert our expectations and unhinge our habits. He requires his dancers to move according to unfamiliar rules; he interferes with their motor control; he attaches prosthetics to their limbs; and he uses text, film, music, lighting and computer technology to disrupt our sense of time and place and dissolve our certainties about the human body. Cross-disciplinary collaboration has been crucial for this ongoing creative questioning of his craft. It is not just that he has used video projection, digital and thermal imaging, or screen animation as production tools, but that on a deeper level he has used ideas from digital technology to inspire him. Concepts such as coding/decoding, generative systems, algorithms and cognitive mapping have informed his understanding of the choreographic process and he has also used different computer programmes to generate movement. While works such as Sulphur 16, Aeon and 53 Bytes explore digital technologies, in Nemesis elongated prosthetic arms inspired an alternative vocabulary of movement. As well as working with other dance and ballet companies, each with their own particular styles and traditions, McGregor has also worked for theatre and opera productions: finding new opportunities to explore through movement fundamental, modalities of being and living. For the last six years, it has been McGregor's collaborations with neuroscientists that have yielded most creatively. In 2002 McGregor embarked on a research project with a group of neuroscientists and psychologists. Backed by an Arts Council England/Arts and Humanities Research Board fellowship hosted at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Cambridge, McGregor set out with ten dancers, an arts researcher, an anthropologist and six cognitive scientists to explore a whole series of questions. How do choreographic ideas get passed from choreographer to dancer? How can you disrupt the process of performing a perfect movement to create an alternative vocabulary? Do dancers experience their own movement from the outside, as though visualizing it from the point of view of the audience, or do they experience it from the inside, as relayed by their own proprioceptive system? How small a segment of movement can be registered as meaningful? For McGregor, it has been the creative possibilities opened up by some of the research and the enhanced awareness he and his dancers have gained of their processes that has been most valuable: "I'm not necessarily interested in the outcomes of these particular experiments but in the principles that they uncover. I've taken those principles and really extended them choreographically¨. McGregor sees no conflict between the languages of dance and science: "The relationship between science and creativity is through making...we go through very similar processes to achieve an outcome. In a sense my improvisations are like experiments... they have a beginning and sets of rules and they unfold as a journey¨. McGregor's work Qualia for The Royal Ballet in December 2003 was influenced by concepts of brain science, as its title, meaning a raw, primary sensory experience suggest. But the first direct outcome of McGregor's time at Cambridge was the dance work AtaXia, first performed at Sadler's Wells in 2004, and named after the neurological condition, which causes progressive loss of muscular coordination. Owing a great deal to McGregor's work with Roz McCarthy of Cambridge University, another inspiration was the contribution of Sarah Seddon Jenner, a sufferer from ataxia, who offered her first person perspective on living within the condition. The resulting work was powerful, exotic, moving and fast moving, articulated through an extreme alternative vocabulary of movement.

Subsequently, McGregor collaborated with the heart-imaging specialists Dr Philip Kilner and Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan and composer John Tavener, a heart patient of Dr Kilner's, on Amu, a meditation on the human heart. For McGregor, working closely with biologists, for whom the entire human body rather than the human brain is the locus of the self, was an important further conceptual step. It has given him another perspective from which to approach his outstanding ambition: to create a dance entity, a virtual choreographic intelligence that can think and remember "a quintessence of physical thinking". Indeed, currently, McGregor has a fellowship at the University of California in San Diego to explore this notion: "It is thrilling to interface with knowledge as it is being found out, to be on the cutting edge of that. Everything is still so unknown. The projects we've done only scratch the surface."

Chroma is yet another concerted scratch at the surface. Rather than exploring dance from within the dancer's body and brain, what Pawson has offered McGregor is the opportunity to see it freshly from without. The word, Chroma, can mean either intensity of colour or freedom from white, and it is in this latter sense that McGregor and Pawson have adopted it. Within the stark, white, at first almost two-dimensional set, it is the colours of the dancers' bodies that register, drawing your eye to their movement. Minute differences in flesh tones from palest pink all the way through to black become emphatic. Put into relief by the volume of space Pawson has created, the body becomes graphic, more exposed, its own architecture revealed by the light that floods through the surrounding set. The music, created by Talbot and The White Stripes, is, within this context, highly provocative, its sometimes violent, massive orchestral passages contrasting with quieter, more enigmatic chamber pieces. The drama of the human body, its ability to contain and communicate extremes of thought and emotion, is foregrounded within Pawson's pure space. ¨It is collaborations like these that ultimately give McGregor's work its particular aesthetic excitement, an excitement that derives from its being in touch with ground-breaking ideas still in the process of formulation.