Lab

There may be no official rule book for staging the perfect event, but the designers featured on the following pages certainly have a few ideas. Everything starts with CHANGING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY. As virtual and augmented realities lose their sci-fi stigma, they become part of a palette that enriches an audience’s experience and connects visitors to a world beyond their own.

Dances with Drones

Wayne McGregor and cohorts frolic with music, sound and dance in a FASCINATING FUSION of digital technology and human physicality.

Words JONATHAN OPENSHAW

Drones controlled by an algorithm interacted with both dancers and audience at +/- Human, a performance choreographed by Wayne McGregor.

DRONES OCCUPY a peculiar position in our society. Not only are they an annoyance, buzzing overhead as you take a quiet walk or flashing neon light in the night sky above city squares; they also pose a threat to targets in countries like Yemen and Pakistan, where remote-controlled military drones reap ‘silent’ death. It’s this strange dissonance – the lurch from annoying to annihilating – that choreographer Wayne McGregor exploits in +/- Human (2017). Appearing in London earlier this year, the performance saw the vaulted space of the Roundhouse filled with giant levitating orbs. Luminous white and fleshy, the spheres – each more than a metre in diameter – were reminiscent of manatees or the bloated characters in Pixar’s Wall-E (2008), simultaneously comic and unsettling. Controlled by an algorithm, the seven objects moved as one, interacting with the audience as well as with the dancers who inhabited the floor below. Audiences have grown used to sophisticated technology in a cultural context, whether it be state-of-the-art CGI in the latest blockbuster, interactive touchscreens at a museum or algorithmic animations at a big brand launch. In fact, many of us have become numbed to digital wizardry, which makes the physicality of +/- Human all the more impactful. The algorithm may be in the driving seat – and miniature motors are certainly peddling away at the orbs’ propellers – but it’s the live dancers from Company Wayne McGregor and The Royal Ballet who dominate the viewer’s experience.

‘We cannot avoid the relationship between people and machine,’ says McGregor, who for decades has made the crossover the focus of his work. ‘What I have tried to do is produce contemporary choreography that is plugged into the real world. I try to pull resources from things that are around, alive and working now.’ There may be more than a hint of the sci-fi about the performance, but McGregor makes it clear that reading +/- Human as futuristic falls far wide of the mark. ‘It’s so present tense. It’s not a version of what it’s going to be like in the future. It’s technology that is happening all the time all around us’.

Technology helps us to explore our positions as humans in the world’

Since founding his studio in 1992, McGregor and his team have developed and realized over 30 original works, proving that intellectually challenging choreography has a mass audience. Resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet in London since 2006, McGregor is also resident at Sadler’s Wells and has accepted commissions from some of the world’s leading classical companies, including the Bolshoi Ballet and the Paris Opera. Few contemporary choreographers have staged crossover work with such a strong appeal, a quality largely driven by his willingness to collaborate.

Random International, which made the installation for +/- Human, have pedigree in immersive art projects that subtly employ technology to powerful ends. Perhaps best known for its international success with Rain Room (2012), in which visitors prepared to stroll through a downpour that magically parted as they passed, Random International has investigated natural swarming patterns for years. One result is Zoological, the seven spheres featured in McGregor’s latest production. Based on swarms of insects, flocks of birds and pods of aquatic animals, the installation straddles the worlds of performance, technology and sculpture.

‘We’re so keen as human beings to assign agency to things that are completely inanimate or virtual,’ says Hannes Koch, cofounder of Random International. ‘The impression that most viewers seem to take away from +/- Human is that Zoological is alive, that it has some kind of sentience.’ Apparently seamless when experienced in the flesh, the sense of intention to which he refers is actually the outcome of incredibly complex programming on the part of Random International. The art lay in making it feel as if the orbs were moving as one and with a higher purpose – and not as though they were preprogrammed or flying on autopilot. The algorithm responded to the dancers, the audience and the spheres, generating a scene of constant recalibration and improvisation. ‘The beauty of this collaboration is that you could not dictate the terms. Once the dancers and orbs are in motion, it’s a ping-pong game in which all the different beings seem to merge.’

Like the relationship between people and technology, McGregor’s choreography evokes both attraction and repulsion. The orbs flock, scatter and coalesce around individual dancers or audience members, while the show’s human participants engage or retreat. Although clearly an interactive work, +/- Human is light years away from the touchscreens and apps that now govern the genre. Here, technology takes a back seat to physical interaction. ‘Technology – always a means to an end – helps us to explore our positions as humans in the world,’ says Koch. ‘Paint, pencils and algorithms are simply creative mediums, no more, no less.’ ●

waynemcgregor.com randominternational.com