Wayne McGregor
Wayne McGregor CBE (born 1970) is a British choreographer of contemporary modern dance. His work is highly distinctive in its vocabulary of movement, for its integration of dance with film and visual art, and for his active interest and incorporation of computer technology and biological science.[1] He is the Artistic Director of Wayne McGregor Random Dance, Resident Company at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London; the Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet, appointed 2006;[2] and the government’s first Youth Dance Champion, appointed 2008.[3] In 2004 McGregor was a Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge.
McGregor is a frequent creator of new work for La Scala Theatre Ballet of Milan; Paris Opera Ballet; Nederlands Dans Theatre of La Hague; San Francisco Ballet; Stuttgart Ballet; New York City Ballet; The Australian Ballet of Melbourne; and English National Ballet of London. He served as Movement Director for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
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[edit] Biography
McGregor was born in Stockport, England, in 1970. He studied dance at Bretton Hall College of the University of Leeds and at the José Limon School in New York. In 1992 he was appointed Choreographer-in-Residence at The Place, London, and in the same year he founded his own company, Wayne McGregor Random Dance. McGregor evolved what was to become his distinctive choreographic style on Random Dance.
His choreography is an extrapolation of his own movement vocabulary: "[It] had its origins in McGregor’s own long, lean and supple physique and in his body’s ability to register movement with peculiar sharpness and speed; at one extreme McGregor’s dancing was a jangle of tiny fractured angles, at the other it was a whirl of seemingly boneless fluidity."[4]
It was during his major trilogy The Millennarium (1997), Sulphur 16 (1998) and Aeon (2000) that the company became a byword for its radical approach to new technology – incorporating animation, digital film, 3D architecture, electronic sound and virtual dancers into the live choreography. Collaborations with leading multi-disciplinary artists enriched the company’s futurist aesthetic and dramatically enlarged the possibilities of dance. In 2001 it was invited to be the first resident company at the new Sadler’s Wells.
His career to date has also taken him beyond the conventional stage, choreographing for films such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, creating site-specific installations for Southbank Centre’s The Hayward, The Saatchi Gallery, the Houses of Parliament and for the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Collaborations with artists outside of the dance field have included composers Sir John Tavener, Scanner, Plaid and Joby Talbot/The White Stripes, animatronics experts, Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop and neuro-scientists and heart-imaging specialists. McGregor was the first to curate, in September 2008, the 3-day long new festival for the Royal Opera House, Deloitte Ignite. This came 18 months after his successful Royal Opera House production Chroma (2006).
McGregor was appointed Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet in December 2006, the first since Kenneth Macmillan. After Chroma, he went on to create the award-winning Infra (premiered at Covent Garden on November 13, 2008) which was followed by a new staging of his La Scala production of the opera Dido and Aeneas -premiered in spring 09 alongside Acis and Galatea (this marked McGregor’s Royal Opera debut). In 2009, McGregor created Limen for The Royal Ballet, and this will be revived at Covent Garden in October 2011. In 2010/2011, McGregor created new work for New York City Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet and Bolshoi Ballet, with a new full-length for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance premiering at Sadler's Wells in December 2010.
McGregor was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to dance.[5]
[edit] Works
[edit] L'Anatomie de la Sensation, pour Francis Bacon
New full-length for the Paris Opera Ballet. The premiere was at Bastille on 2 July 2011 (postponed from the original date of 29 June due to strikes). Inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon, to music by British composer Mark Antony-Turnage with a set by Chroma designer John Pawson; Lighting Designer Lucy Carter and Costume Designer Moritz Junge - both McGregor regulars - round off the creative team.
[edit] Live Fire Exercise
McGregor's newest work for The Royal Ballet - it premiered on 13 May 2011 - a collaboration with the visual artist John Gerrard, a creator of ‘real-time virtual worlds’, and composer Michael Tippett.
[edit] Radiohead - Lotus Flower
The video for the song Lotus Flower by Radiohead features lead singer, Thom Yorke, dancing to the choreography of McGregor. The video was made available on the band's YouTube channel on 18 February 2011 and has received more than 11 million hits; it has also spurned almost 100 'copycat' videos.
[edit] FAR
Currently touring the UK and internationally, FAR is the newest full-length by McGregor for his own company, Wayne McGregor | Random Dance. It has music by Brian Eno collaborator Ben Frost, lighting by Lucy Carter, costumes by Moritz Junge and set design by the art and design collective Random iNternational (no relation!). 2011 performances include: London, Laban Theatre (9, 10 March) Aldeburgh, Snape Maltings (18, 19 March) Huddersfield, Lawrence Batley (22 March) Winchester Theatre Royal (18, 19 May) Rome, Italy, Auditorium Conciliazione (1 June) Truro, Hall for Cornwall (21 June) Brighton Dome (26 September) Edinburgh Festival Theatre (4, 5 October) Belfast Festival (14.15 October)
[edit] Yantra
McGregor's third work for Stuttgart Ballet - following 'Nautilus' (2003) and 'EDEN|EDEN' (2005). Music by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
[edit] Outlier
McGregor's debut for New York City Ballet, with music by British composer Thomas Ades. It premiered at the Lincoln Center on 14 May 2010
[edit] Entity
Entity [6] is an hour-long dance piece for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance featuring 10 dancers and soundscape created by Jon Hopkins (Coldplay and Massive Attack collaborator) and award-winning composer Joby Talbot. Entity premiered at the Sadler's Wells Theatre, London in April 2008. In December 2010, Entity became the first full length dance performance available on Apple's iTunes video download service.
[edit] Dyad 1909
One of two ballets that McGregor created to celebrate the centenary of the Ballets Russes; the other is Dyad 1929, for The Australian Ballet. Dyad 1909, for Wayne McGregor Random Dance, is inspired by Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition to the South Pole in 1909, the year that the Ballets Russes was founded. The creative team includes the acclaimed artists and filmmakers Jane and Louise Wilson, longstanding lighting designer Lucy Carter and costume designer Moritz Junge. Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds provides a newly commissioned score combining piano, strings and electronics.
[edit] Limen
Limen is McGregor’s most recent work for The Royal Ballet. It premiered at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in November 2009. It uses the classical vocabulary of 15 dancers, including Edward Watson, Leanne Benjamin, Steven McRae, Sarah Lamb and Eric Underwood. The women dance en pointe lending the work a more classical air than MacGregor's previous Royal Ballet commissions. Its centrepiece is an ethereal pas de deux, danced in bright spotlight against a black backdrop set to a futuristically raw sounds of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. McGregor says that Limen - a word that relates to ideas of limits and thresholds - is a meditation on ‘thresholds of life and death, darkness and light, reality and fantasy’.[citation needed] Such borderline territory is akin to that of the work of Japanese contemporary conceptual artist Tatsuo Miyajima, with whom McGregor has collaborated on the sets.
[edit] Dido and Aeneas / Acis and Galatea
A new double bill of Purcell and Handel, conceived, directed and choreographed by Royal Ballet Resident Choreographer, Wayne McGregor. The production uniquely combines the forces of both The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet companies. McGregor’s Dido and Aeneas is based on his production at La Scala, Milan, in 2006. Here it is paired with Handel’s pastoral masque Acis and Galatea. Lead singers include Sarah Connolly (Dido) and Danielle de Niese (Galatea), making her Covent Garden debut. For Acis, the dancers include Edward Watson, Lauren Cuthbertson and Eric Underwood. Set designs are by Hildegard Bechtler; costume designs are by Fotini Dimou and lighting design is by Lucy Carter; The Orchestra of The Age Of Enlightenment is conducted by Christopher Hogwood.
[edit] Infra
Infra created for The Royal Ballet and premiered in November 2008 at the Royal Opera House. The set for the show included a 18 metre LCD display with animations by British artist Julian Opie who also designed the set. The music for the show was by composer Max Richter. The show had a cast of 12 dancers from the Royal Ballet and also a number of extras with short non-dancing roles.
The BBC aired a special one hour feature which documented the making of Infra, and also showed the work in full.[7]
[edit] Chroma
Chroma is McGregor’s 2006 award-winning dance piece for The Royal Ballet. The score, drawn from compositions and arrangements by Joby Talbot and his arrangements of music by The White Stripes, is paired with stark minimalist designs by architect John Pawson.
[edit] Awards
- 2010: Critics Circle National Dance Award for Infra (Best Choreography - Classical)
- 2009: International Theatre Institute's Excellence In International Dance
- 2009: Ballet Tanz's Choreographer Of The Year
- 2009: Movimentos Award for Entity
- 2009: Prix Benois de la Danse for Infra
- 2008: South Bank Show Award for Entity and Infra
- 2007: Critics Circle National Dance Award for Chroma (Best Choreography – Classical)
- 2007: Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production for Chroma
- 2007: South Bank Show Awardfor The Royal Ballet triple bill which featured Chroma
- 2003: Time Out Live Awards Outstanding Choreography
- 2001: Time Out Live Awards Outstanding Achievement in Dance Award
[edit] Choreographic style
McGregor’s choreography is characterised by dynamic, sharp, often fragmented and often sinuously fluid movement. This movement vocabulary has its origins in McGregor’s own long, lean and supple physique and in his body’s ability to register movement with peculiar sharpness and speed.[citation needed]
[edit] Fascination with technology and science
McGregor started playing with computers when he was seven and it was natural for him to incorporate the cyber world into his own choreography[citation needed]. Collaborating with state-of-the-art designers, he experimented with projecting computer generated images onto the stage. In Sulphur 16 (1998) his dancers were dwarfed by the presence of a shimmering virtual giant and danced with a company of digital figures who wove and shimmered among them. In Aeon (2000) digitally created landscapes transported the dancers to what seemed like other dimensions and other worlds.
On specific occasions McGregor has used technology to alter the conditions under which his work is viewed. 53 Bytes (1997) was created for simultaneous performance by two sets of dancers in Berlin and Canada and it was watched by audiences in both countries by live satellite link. In 2000 McGregor aimed for a wider global public by transmitting a live performance of his Trilogy Installation over the internet.
Wayne McGregor Random Dance has been the vehicle for McGregor’s ongoing fascination with the mechanisms of the human body. In Amu (2005) he explored the functions and the symbolism of the heart, in Ataxia (2004) the connection between brain and body movement and in Entity (2008) the links between artificial intelligence and choreography.
During Entity rehearsals, he and the dancers worked alongside six international cognitive scientists and technologists from esteemed institutes including University College London, University of Cambridge, University of California, San Diego and Imperial College London. In January 2009 they traveled to University of California, San Diego and created a new piece of work under ‘lab’ conditions, Dyad 1909; fueling the search for new creative decisions on the part of McGregor and new findings in the brain/body relationship for the scientists.[citation needed]
[edit] Credits
[edit] Dance performance
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[edit] Film/TV
[edit] Theatre
[edit] Opera
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[edit] References
- ^ [1] www.randomdance.org >Wayne McGregor >About
- ^ [2] Norman Lebrecht, "How Wayne will change the Royal Ballet," 5 December 2006, scena.org.
- ^ British Government Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Media Release "Award-winning choreographer Wayne McGregor appointed country's first ‘Dance Champion’ for young people by Margaret Hodge"
- ^ [3] www.randomdance.org >Wayne McGregor >Biography
- ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 59647. p. 8. 31 December 2010.
- ^ Random Dance: Entity
- ^ Debra, Craine (November 17, 2008). "Infra at Covent Garden". The Times
[edit] External links
- Random Dance
- Royal Opera House
- Interview with Wayne McGregor, IAS, University of Minnesota, September 2009
- THE OBSERVER, 11 November 2009
- THE GUARDIAN, 9 November 2009
- THE NEW YORK TIMES, 28 November 2008
- THE SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE, 20 April 2008
- THE TELEGRAPH, 14 April 2008
- THE GUARDIAN, 11 April 2008
- THE FINANCIAL TIMES, feature about Wayne McGregor, 5 April 2008
- TIME MAGAZINE, feature about Wayne McGregor, 2 April 2008
- THE EVENING STANDARD, 1 April 2008
