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3 hours ago
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Wayne McGregor wants to teach us about physical intelligence. He wants us to feel our bodies in space, to use them to understand the world, each other and the digital realm. It’s a lofty vision that the 55-year-old choreographer has long been investigating through the creation of dance works, but also by collaborating on academic research, working with new technology, and in fashion, film and music such as hit show ABBA Voyage.
McGregor is an artist, but also an entrepreneur, a man who makes things happen, and it’s fantastic to see a major exhibition dedicated to a choreographer as part of Somerset House’s 25th anniversary as an arts venue. This is no retrospective though. You won’t be guided through McGregor’s three decades of work and you’re unlikely to see a live dancer (members of the company will occasionally be in residence). Instead, there are a series of installations made by McGregor’s collaborators from the technology and design spheres, some of which need the visitor’s own body to trigger them.
One of these is the artificially intelligent movement archive AISoma, developed with Google, where you can record an eight-second dance visualised by a slightly clunky stick figure, from which AI will extrapolate new movement. It’s fleetingly fun, even if the result looks fairly random. The idea is to jog the creative process of a dancer stuck for inspiration. Is it any better than Merce Cunningham’s rolling of the dice? Well it’s certainly a lot more expensive. But is this what Cunningham would be doing if he were alive today? Maybe. As a visitor, I preferred Random International’s Future Self: 10,000 LED lights hanging in a column which light up in response to your movement to make a glittering shadow, as if your spectre’s trapped inside. It’s a poetic effect: we are starlight.
Is there enough here, enough “wow” moments, to rock our world (or truly get inside McGregor’s art)? Sometimes idea and process are richer than output – and you can see McGregor’s own neatly written notebooks for a glimpse behind the scenes. There’s also a room of movement-sensitive mirrors, like a clan of miniature paparazzi turning their gaze on you, a 2003 film by director Olivier Megaton featuring a young McGregor that looks like David Cronenberg meets Daft Punk, plus McGregor’s own forays into visual art-making in 3D-printed sculpture – a crouched figure (from his piece Far) glimpsed through the frame of another installation, is a highlight.
To see what all McGregor’s conceptualising leads to, in terms of choreographic creation, you’ll need to visit On the Other Earth, the UK premiere of a cutting-edge immersive 360-degree film, watched with 3D glasses inside a black cylindrical screen (15 minutes walk away from the exhibition, on a separate ticket). An hour spent standing in the dark will certainly make you more aware of your own body’s (creaky) sensations, but the effects are undoubtedly impressive, whether digital manipulations or just lifesize bodies up so close you can really see the detail. In the theatre, McGregor’s dancers, barely clad humans in their absolute prime, can seem like perfectly honed machines, “bodies” rather than people, and this closeup view is a corrective to that.
Without seeing On the Other Earth, the exhibition alone might feel rather abstract. It’s cool, in both senses: “Oh, that’s cool”, and also emotional distance, despite our physical presence – that’s the paradox in the work. But Infinite Bodies is full of questions and genuinely innovative; the work of a creator brimming with bold ideas.
