Infra E-resource pack 2018

ARTIST PROCESSES
20
WAYNE MCGREGOR’S CHOREOGRAPHIC STYLE
CHOREOGRAPHIC INTENTION
Born in 1970, Wayne McGregor CBE is a multi-award-winning British
choreographer and director, internationally renowned for trailblazing
innovations in performance that have radically redefined dance in the modern
era. Driven by an insatiable curiosity about movement and its creative
potentials, his experiments have led him into collaborative dialogue with an
array of artistic forms, scientific disciplines and technological interventions.
The startling and multi-dimensional works resulting from these interactions
have ensured McGregor’s position at the cutting edge of contemporary arts
for over two decades.
Infra explores the theme of seeing below the surface of a city, in this case,
London. In a busy city like London crowds of strangers pass each other
every day without knowing anything about what is happening in each other’s
lives. People’s feelings and emotions are often restrained, meaning socially
unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into
socially acceptable actions or behaviour. McGregor said that this idea for
physiological research coincided with his observations during the London
bombings in 2005 where 52 people were killed and more than
770 injured by suicide bombers on the London transport system:
www.waynemcgregor.com/about/wayne-mcgregor
Company Wayne McGregor (originally called Random Dance) was the original
instrument through which McGregor evolved his distinctive visual style,
revealing the movement possibilities of the body in ever more precise degrees
of articulation.
‘London had a very particular feeling at that time. It was exposed in a really
extreme way to an act of violence and people behaved very differently. There
was a different type of humanity in the city that you don’t normally see. We are
all so busy usually, getting to where we are going, ignoring all the other people
that are around us and being very focussed on our needs. Those bombings in
London actually broke open the city and people really genuinely did have an
empathy and a feeling and a care for one another and I thought that was a
really interesting tension, the tension of what cities are normally like and then
this extreme event that happened and then what they what they become.’
Wayne McGregor in rehearsals
©ROH/Johan Persson, 2013
Wayne McGregor, AQA interview, 2016
Infra explores the emotional aspects of humanity. The dancers represent
people who reveal a normally hidden aspect of themselves in raw, vulnerable
and honest ways. The piece uncovers a series of relationships and portraits
of society, provoking questions like:
What do people hide from one another?
What happens in people’s internal lives?
What happens behind closed doors?