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SCRUTINY | Sir Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography Fascinates At FFDN24

By Paula Citron on October 3, 2024

Fall for Dance North: Company Wayne McGregor (Photo: Ollie Adegboye)
Fall for Dance North: Company Wayne McGregor (Photo: Ollie Adegboye)

Fall For Dance North 2024 / AUTOBIOGRAPHY V98 + V99, choreographed by Sir Wayne McGregor, performed by Company Wayne McGregor, The Creative School Chrysalis (formerly Ryerson Theatre), Oct. 1 and 2. Tickets here.

That this internationally acclaimed London-based company, helmed by a legendary choreographer, has come to Toronto for an exclusive Canadian engagement is a huge plum for FFDN. There isn’t a major dance company in the world that doesn’t have a McGregor work in its repertoire. What a spectacular get!

McGregor is a master of the abstract in dance. He is at once cerebral, intellectual, philosophical, experimental and intense, yet his movement radiates meaning to the audience from some subliminal level within the choreography. As he himself has said, his work interprets life through the experience of the body.

Fall for Dance North: Company Wayne McGregor (Photo: Ravi Deepres)
Fall for Dance North: Company Wayne McGregor (Photo: Ravi Deepres)

Wayne McGregor: Autbiography

Where to start in explaining the complexities of Autobiography, which features nine dancers, and which premiered in 2017 to celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary. The best place was to go to McGregor’s own website.

In the notes about Autobiography, we are told that McGregor approached this piece as if the body was an archive. In other words, McGregor sequenced his own genetic code working with IT guru Nick Rothwell to create the algorithm. Thus, Autobiography is a meditation on McGregor’s own life story, based on his own DNA.

Apparently, the wellspring of the piece came from old writings, personal memories, and pieces of art and music that were important to McGregor.

From these elements, McGregor, with the participation of his dancers, created 23 sections of movement material, reflecting the 23 pairs of chromosomes of the human genome. These pieces of choreography were then fed into the algorithm based on McGregor’s genetic code.

For every performance, the algorithm randomly selects a different section of code from McGregor’s genome to determine which 15 of the 23 pieces of choreography will be performed and in which order, book-ended by a fixed beginning and end. Thus every performance is unique. (Apparently the dancers find out two days in advance, and the order is also posted in the wings.)

Says McGregor, “Life unfolds without our having any control, and we have to deal with those instances.”

Thus, Autobiography is life — writing itself anew, and his collaborators used this concept in their creations.

American electronic composer Jlin based her score on McGregor’s genome reading. Ben Cullen Williams’ set comprises of banks of steel triangles welded together that resemble a DNA thread, while Aitor Throup’s costumes came out of the designer’s own 12 year archive.

But it is the dazzling lighting of Lucy Carter that is like a tenth dancer in the piece — banks of neon lights that move up, down and all around, augmented by back lights that swivel, so their beams can travel in different directions.

In the talk back with the nine dancers after the performance, they mentioned such things like the human quality they feel in the choreography, that it is like living in real time, that each section is like a little pocket of life, that it is like existing in Wayne’s life, that the piece is unpredictable, and it’s like meeting new dancers every time.

The V98 and V99 in the title refer to the number of times Company Wayne McGregor has performed Autobiography, and in fact, describe the two different performances in Toronto. We are versions 98 and 99.

The Review

And at last, we finally come to the review.

Autobiography is dense choreography executed by dancers of immense technical virtuosity. That is a given. They are, after all, Company Wayne McGregor.

Often, all nine dancers are doing something different, and how well McGregor keeps his ducks in a row is one of the glories of the work. The stage picture always looks intriguing within the smoky haze that covers the stage. There are, of course, solos and duets amid the large ensembles, but they all fit together as a whole cloth.

McGregor knows how to use the body in creating gorgeous shapes. His extraordinary dancers are so supple and flexible that they can move every limb and joint at will. At once classical and contemporary, the movement takes on an ethereal quality, as if from another world.

At times it’s hard to know if it is a man or woman who is dancing, but in reality, it doesn’t matter. The genderless quality of the work adds to the mysterious and dreamy atmosphere that pervades the piece which I found mesmerizing.

Some sections are very physical, while others seem more gentle. Some are overtly emotional, while in others, the dancers seem distant or remote. Some are driven by rhythm, others are set against an endless drone. Some seem kinder, even evoking pleasure, while others express pain. Some show fight, while others show comfort. Some sections seem chaotic, while others are rigidly structured.

There are also moments of stillness, and darkness and silence, but always, one was conscious of a non-stop flow of movement, the very river of existence.

In other words, Autobiography is a work of infinite variety, just like a life should be.

Apparently, each section has a name, but we got projections above the stage for just a few of them. Was it a projection glitch, or has McGregor decided to give only a few hints throughout the piece. And another fact: at one time, all 23 sections were performed by ten dancers. Did we get 15 sections because there is one less dancer?

Regardless, Sir Wayne McGregor is one of the most endlessly fascinating choreographers in the world today, and the audacious and ambitious Autobiography is the proof.

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Paula Citron
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