"Not I": Autobiography by Wayne McGregor

A scene from Autobiography, photo Andrej Uspenski.

“What does it mean to write one’s own story?” recites the programme of Autobiography (2017) by contemporary dance Company Wayne McGregor. It is a complex question and dancers and choreographers have responded to it in different manners. Modern dance pioneer, Isadora Duncan, introducing her 1927 autobiography, remarked on the difficulty of writing, “it has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the Art of writing to realise that it would take me again just so many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence”. More recently, ballet dancer and choreographer Carlos Acosta has dealt with the question of autobiography in various ways, that span from his semi-autobiographical 2003 work, Tocororo, to his 2008 book No Way Home to the weeks-old release of a film about his story, Yuli, where autobiographical elements intertwne with the film narrative.

McGregor has opted for another path, that of science, technology, fluid kinetism and some ‘seeds’ from his past. The genesis for this choreography, as David Jays from The Guardian has pointed out, began with his fascination for artificial intelligence and with what role could it have in his work. This brought McGregor to focus on his genetic code and on how he could transform it into another form. He also took some personal aspects from his life, “family things, photographs, poetry I have written” and turned them into what he calls ‘volumes’, sections that are assembled at every performance according to an algorithm created by Nick Rothwell. In this way, every performance has a different sequence.

The one presented at the Ponchielli Theatre in Cremona, Italy, on Saturday 13th of April, began with “1 avatar”, where a bare-chested male dancer moves across space, articulating his arms up and down, kicking one leg backwards, extending his legs and then going down in deep second. It is an intense solo that seems to create a sharp contrast with the geometric structure above him. Designed by Ben Cullen Williams, it covers the whole stage ceiling and it consists of metal poles in the shape of pyramids pointing downwards. It is a huge structure that will move down and up during the performance. As in “6 sleep”, when it dramatically moves down almost touching the stage floor and ‘forcing’ the dancers to assume a horizontal position (the one we take when we sleep).

The dancers are all exceptional. I remember watching McGregor’s work years ago (probably around 2008) in London. I think the choreography was Entity (2008). His company at the time was called Random Dance and was again made of great dancers. However, I noticed a kind of unsmooth quality in their movement, something that disappeared when I saw his Infra (2008) performed by the Royal Ballet. In Autobiography, the dancers command both the grammar of classical dance and that of more torso-oriented techniques. The arms, for exmple, cut the space in numerous directions, taking the shapes of balletic port de bras or magnetic and quick unfolding and retracting lines. It is a real pleasure to watch this fluid approach to movement.

The other aspect that stroke me is the masterful light design by McGregor’s long time collaborator, Lucy Carter. In some moments one can only say “Wow!” to what she has elaborated. Like in volume “19 ageing”, when a pink-haired female dancer, arms in second, is enveloped by a beautiful red light or in “8 nurture” when blinding lights from the back of the stage are repeatedly turned on dirupting the audience’s sight.

Autobiography is and is not about McGregor. It is about his genetic code, fragments from his life transmuted into movement, lights, music, set, dramaturgy and so on. One of the volumes is called “13 not I” and is paradigmatic of his approach. It is not about his own individual self in traditional narrative terms. In the programme note he talks about the body as archive, a notion that has been under scrutiny by dance scholars for some time now. One of them, André Lepecki, has analysed it in relation to some examples of re-enactment, stating that it is “a system of transforming simultaneously past, present, and future”. And McGregor considers it along these lines, “not as a nostalgia-fest but as an idea of speculative future. Each cell carries in it the whole blueprint of your life.”