Meeting Wayne McGregor can be a discomfiting experience, because you feel like he’s constantly analysing your every move. A multi-award-winning British choreographer, he has been commissioned by the world’s biggest ballet companies, despite never having really trained in ballet. He also likes to work on multidisciplinary film projects (including blockbusters such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Tarzan ), fashion shows, and television. His forte remains experimental choreography — he’s been known, for instance, to deploy coding technology to choreograph pieces. Mix the Body , the latest project of his dance company, Studio Wayne McGregor, was an interactive performance, created as part of the UK/India Year of Culture. Dancers of Bengaluru’s Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts collaborated on the project. Apart from performances world over, Mix the Body invited participants from different countries to create their own choreography using a preloaded programme on the British Council website. McGregor shared with BL ink insights on his versatile approach to choreography and what lay behind it.
Your compositions have multiple performances on the same stage — live dancers, recorded footageon a screen, and mise en scène elements such as light on stage. Could the use of so many different kinds of media prove distracting for the audience?
I don’t think having multiple media distracts from a performance. It all depends on how people watch it, and what their expectations are while watching. The dance or film space doesn’t have to be sacrosanct. Sometimes in a film, directors take advantage of the split-screen, where you’re watching two-to-four narratives simultaneously and constructing meaning from it. Watching a real-time multimedia performance is similar to that. There should be no hierarchy in what takes the forefront. Different elements come to the fore every time — it may be the body that speaks the loudest, another time it might be the music, but, for me, the visual element can also take forefront. I am interested in the interplay of all these elements — that helps me engage with the audience in a different conversation with the piece.
For me, choreography is expressed as much in the lights, as it is in the body. And so, you may see lights connecting in a pattern or a seeming movement, and, sometimes, in correlation with the body; and here, the entire attention may be held by, say, the light panel. This is about an aspiration to push back the envelope of what’s possible,
So, in a postmodernist world, doesn’t everyone’s interpretation count?
We think we all have a unique way of watching, but we don’t. There have been experiments where they have done retinal tracking of people watching shows and, surprisingly, there are a lot of moments of consensus, and always at moments of virtuosity. For instance, in ballet, virtuosity might be the person who is spinning, so it’s a given that there is a concentration of all eyes in one place.
What place does precision have vis-a-vis creativity in a dance performance?
Time in a performance is multiple. There is clock time, where the dancers dance a phrase for, say, 30 seconds. Another way of thinking about time could be invented time, where the dancers decide how long or short the vocabulary is. In a performance like ours, what we really do is not keep time, but shape time. We’re not listening to a rhythm and dancing on it — what is generally known as metronomic time. We’re trying to give you an experience of time and shaping action accordingly. You can pull that off without a beat, but you get a sense of the time it takes. How we work is we let the dancers co-opt in the choreography of the piece, hence it is off them, because it has their physical signature. It isn’t restrictive but made together... I feel that’s what makes a performance feel alive. The feeling of improvisation has to do with timing.
How do you provide the environment for your dancer to be actively thinking while he’s dancing?
It’s part of training. If you’ve collaborated on creating the piece, it’s different from if it were made on you. The richness of what you know is greater. I think it’s the same for the dancers — they know already where it’s coming from, and they’re experienced in dealing with the other person’s decisions. Practice and rehearsals are not about getting the steps right. That we do from Day 3, but it’s about taking the performance level really high in terms of timing.
How do you pick dancers for your company?
I can pretty much tell when a person walks into a room if he fits or not. Do they look at you? Are they too busy doing the stretches and splits to show off all of that, or if there is more. I expect their bodies to be very well-trained. However, what I try to do in an audition is test their creative abilities. That is more important than the technical stuff that I already expect. I expect good training, movement, extension and musicality. That’s low level. I expect the other stuff — an ability to think for yourself, say with your body what nobody else can say — an ability to have a uniqueness of moving. I expect them to process the movement that I make. You have to have an amazing listener, to hijack music, someone who is super-quick to pick material up, and to adapt. Someone who is good with change.
What’s your regular day like?
I don’t have a regular day because I’m travelling a lot. I am either at the studio or the ballet. Or I’m working with another ballet company or with a movie. When it’s a movie that I’m working on, I’m out very early at 5 [in the morning], and back at 11 pm. When you’re at the studio, that’s a 12-week process. I don’t have a typical day and I purposely choose projects that are different, because I get bored very easily. What I try to do is have opportunities in a year that are diverse.