May 19, 2008

Wayne McGregor's Random Dance Explores Cognition and Artificial Intelligence

"Entity" is the latest work from Wayne McGregor's London-based dance company, Random Dance. Entity, which premiered at Sadler's Wells on April 10, 2008, is part of McGregor's on-going exploration of the relationship of cognition and physiology to dance.

Time Magazine, in "Wayne McGregor: Mind in Motion" captures McGregor's approach to choreography:

McGregor, 37, belongs to a generation of choreographers who take ideas, rather than music, as their starting point, and are more interested in presenting audiences with an intellectual challenge -- "disrupting their expectations," as McGregor puts it -- than entertaining them in the traditional fashion.

Here is "The making of Entity":

A slightly higher quality version of this video, "The Making of Entity," is available on the home page for Random dance.

And you can watch performance excerpts from Entity:

The Guardian Unlimited published a story, "Can science and dance work together?" which includes a video interview with McGregor about Entity. In the interview, the choreographer expands on the themes of this work:

The piece draws on ideas from artificial intelligence and intelligent agents to create an environment in which we can explore ideas dealing with kinesthetic intelligence.

Click following image to watch this interview on Guardian Unlimited site:

This new dance piece is part of the Entity research project. The ambitious focus of this research initiative is "to develop adaptive software agents that can generate unique solutions to choreographic problems; and to continue to work towards establishing principles of choreographic and physical thinking (distributed and embodied)." [Source: Sadler's Wells]

Choreography and Cognition

The website for Choreography and Cognition includes extensive reports and research that resulted from a project initiated by arts researcher Scott deLahunta and Wayne McGregor. The goal of this project (2002-2004) was to "engage practitioners from the field of cognitive science in seeking connections between creativity, choreography and the scientific study of movement and the mind."

Scott deLahunta describes the origins and focus of this project in "Choreography and Cognition: A joint research project" (view research papers) and outlines the three primary objectives:

Shared objective: to seek connections between choreographic processes and the study of movement and the brain/mind that are scientifically and artistically interesting.

Artistic objective: to integrate the participation and contribution from the scientists into the fabric of the choreographic process while maintaining the integrity of the modes of looking and questioning pertaining to their respective research areas.

Scientific objective: to start to formulate specific questions and research methodologies that arise from the individual interests in this project in the context of the creative choreographic process.

"AtaXia," a dance work choreographed by McGregor and part of this interdisciplinary research project, premiered in London in June 2004. To learn about AtaXia, you can read a 2004 paper by Sanjoy Roy in the projects paper section. Or click this link for the paper in rich-text format. The paper opens:

Is Wayne McGregor losing control? AtaXia, his newest piece, takes its ideas from the neurological condition of the same name, which causes progressive loss of muscular co-ordination. For dancers, this is potentially risky territory to explore: mastery of movement is the foundation of their craft. Perhaps it's riskier still for a choreographer like McGregor, whose work so often looks super-human, demanding superlative skills of balance and timing from his performers.

See photo gallery for images from Choreography and Cognition research and AtaXia performance:

Of the Heart

Of The Heart is another interdisciplinary project (2004-2005) that, in this instance, combined insights and expertise of cardiologists and choreographers. From this cooperative effort came McGregor's Amu, which premiered September 2005. You can watch excepts from Amu.

There are two video sections on the Of the Heart website in the form of questions and answers that are very helpful and insightful. The first video section deals with the science of the heart and features interviews with two cardiologists. The second video section deals with choreographic topics and features a Q & A with Wayne McGregor.

I appreciate the efforts of the heart specialists and McGregor to address specific questions about how this research into cardiovascular topics (the heart, blood flow and related issues) influenced the actual choreography. For example, watch the answer in the choreography section that McGregor offers to the question: "How has the shape of the heart and the flow of blood through the heart affected the choreographic ideas in Amu?" Here's the transcript:

There are many things that we learn...things to do with this notion of symmetry and asymmetry in the body. Whether or not symmetry or asymmetry creates stability or instability. So those kinds of things have very clear spatial references and relevances to the piece.

This idea that there are different types of flow inside the body and the exchange of blood inside and through the heart is really quite extraordinary. The work of the heart as both a pump and electrical device if you like has resonance in the way in which I have thought about structure of bodies in space.

So through the piece you start with an ensemble and an individual. By the end you are working with a plural set of bodies that are behaving almost like blood flow, if you like. They are rapidly working through choreographic ideas that are related to physicality in the body itself.

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