{"id":97140,"date":"2025-10-25T10:11:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T10:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/97140\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T10:11:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T10:11:12","slug":"wayne-mcgregor-on-embracing-ai-and-why-we-should-all-think-like-dancers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/97140\/","title":{"rendered":"Wayne McGregor on embracing AI \u2014 and why we should all think like dancers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cExhibitions on choreography and choreographers tend to be around scenography or costume design,\u201d says Wayne McGregor, \u201cthe actual things that are part of performance, and maybe photography and film.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGregor, though, does things differently. Probably the best-known name in Britain\u2019s dance world, a knight of the realm, resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet since 2006 (the first contemporary dancer to hold the post) and founder of his own Company Wayne McGregor<\/a>, his work is now the subject of an exhibition at Somerset House, which opens later this month. At Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies the trappings and ephemera of theatrical performance will be in short supply.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not to minimise the significance of the stage work,\u201d says McGregor, now 55, who has made at least 200 works in his 30-plus years of practice. \u201cBut my art-making is process-oriented, not product-oriented, and much of my work \u2014 with my dancers and with scientists \u2014 is about investigating physical intelligence. That\u2019s what this exhibition is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ARebecca Bassett-Graham in Studio Wayne McGregor\u2019s \u2018No One Is an Island\u2019 (2021) \u00a9 Ravi Deepres<\/p>\n

He believes that choreographic thinking pervades every area and moment of our daily lives. He wants us to leave Infinite Bodies not quite dancing, but more aware than ever of our bodies and the extraordinary sensibilities and possibilities they contain. At a time of AI, in which McGregor revels, he also wants to dig into the emotional and physical messiness that makes us unique. \u00a0<\/p>\n

McGregor\u2019s practice has gone far beyond the traditional territories of ballet and contemporary dance. He has worked on Harry Potter movies, videos for The Chemical Brothers and Radiohead, fashion shows for Gareth Pugh, adverts for Selfridges, and the lifelike avatars that star in ABBA: Voyage, where the Swedish pop stars reappear in digitally spectacular form (thanks to the uber-technologists at Industrial Light & Magic) as their freshest twenty-something selves.<\/p>\n

But equally (or indeed more) important to McGregor are the periods he has spent with cognitive neuroscientists in Cambridge trying, for example, to work out how we build images in our minds, or with roboticists working on empathetic connections. Meanwhile, with a Paris-based team at Google Arts & Culture Lab, he has developed a choreographic language agent called AISOMA \u2014 a tool that can, when fed endless moves, create and reiterate phrases and movements from a huge repository of dance data. Visitors to Infinite Bodies will get to try it for themselves.<\/p>\n

\"WayneWayne McGregor: \u2018We have a responsibility to extend the conversation around dance-making outwards\u2019 \u00a9 Photographed for the FT by Suzannah Pettigrew<\/p>\n

While ballet can be overly hidebound by tradition, the far reaches of the dance world can be just as elitist in their avant-garde inaccessibility. McGregor somehow manages to push at all the boundaries while keeping the public \u2014 to gauge by his audiences \u2014 involved. \u201cWe have a responsibility to extend the conversation around dance-making outwards,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery one of us can move in some way, and has a physical imprint.\u201d<\/p>\n

In January next year, a book titled We Are Movement will be published by Bloomsbury. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely not an autobiography,\u201d says McGregor, himself a rangy 6ft 2 inches tall, often clad in flowing black Rick Owens get-ups. \u201cIt\u2019s about how we think with our bodies, and how some physical habits get in the way of us experiencing life more fully. It\u2019s an everyman\u2019s guide to unlocking physical potential.\u201d Infinite Bodies might be its parallel in exhibition form.<\/p>\n

McGregor grew up in a working-class home in Stockport, near Manchester, and first found his way into dance through disco classes at his local dance school. He went on to take a degree in dance at Bretton Hall, a freewheeling arts institute outside Leeds, housed in a stately pile in its own park. (That building, a casualty of education cuts, is now being converted into a Yorkshire outpost of London\u2019s Groucho Club.) <\/p>\n

\u201cI shared a house with a potter and a painter and a musician,\u201d he says. \u201cWe all worked on each other\u2019s projects; we weren\u2019t confined by specific categories.\u201d This tendency has infused McGregor\u2019s work ever since. He has collaborated with artists (Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson), and musicians (Jamie xx, Thomas Ad\u00e8s), and adapted the work of writers such as Margaret Atwood into ballet form. (Reading Atwood, he says, \u201cis like experiencing VR, but without needing the goggles.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies\u2019 is at London\u2019s Somerset House \u00a9 Studio Wayne McGregor; Industrial Light & Magic<\/p>\n

He loves the rigour these partnerships bring. \u201cThe best artistry \u2014 in music, fashion, art \u2014 is a combination of extreme creativity and incredible craft,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s the same in dance: you can\u2019t fake technique, the hours of training are visible. But it\u2019s nothing without imagination and intellect.\u201d At the moment, his favourite downtime TV programme is a BBC documentary series on the Japanese restoration master Koji Mayuyama. \u201cIt\u2019s so beautiful to watch him at work, taking a tea bowl that\u2019s been messed up by a previous restoration, seeing him bringing it back to life.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Somerset House, visitors will be thrown into McGregor\u2019s universe from the very first room. There they will encounter an endless pas de deux performed by two of his dancers \u2014 Italian Salvatore de Simone and the ice-white-haired Rebecca Bassett-Graham \u2014 whose bodies fold, turn and swoop across a state-of-the-art screen, their figures rendered hyper-real by a new performance-capture system developed by ILM. It is, in truth, McGregor\u2019s entrepreneurial partnerships with technologists that will make this an exhibition unlike anything seen before.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about virtual presence since the early \u201990s,\u201d says McGregor, his Stockport accent softened, but not erased, by his years down south. \u201cAs humans we have looked for ways to re-represent the body since the beginning. From cave drawings to Frankenstein, it\u2019s about getting closer to ourselves through an alternative version.\u201d This is taken to its state-of-the-art apotheosis in On the Other Earth, which premiered in both the Venice Dance Biennale and the Venice Film Festival this summer, a post-cinematic experience that immerses viewers in a wraparound stereoscopic panorama.<\/p>\n

\"AWayne McGregor\u2019s \u2018On the Other Earth\u2019 (2025), performed by Hong Kong Ballet \u00a9 Ravi Deepres\"AnA dancer turns to pixels in \u2018On the Other Earth\u2019 \u00a9 Ravi Deepres and Luke Unsworth<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never been able to find an equivalent to live performance before,\u201d McGregor says. But here, within a circular 12K LED screen (cinemas have 4k), an audience of up to 20 people can both feel and see the dancers around them, every hair and pore of their bodies clearly visible, every intake of breath.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can have the dancers pass through the audience \u2014 it\u2019s as though they are there,\u201d says McGregor. At other moments, their bodies appear to granulate into flurries of dots that swirl through the darkened room and flutter past your shoulder. I saw it in Venice and found it both extremely discombobulating and utterly amazing. Here, it will be in an off-site venue on London\u2019s Shaftesbury Avenue, now called Stone Nest, but known to those of my generation as the Limelight club. It\u2019s as good a place as any to break down the fourth wall.<\/p>\n

If such whizz-bang tech can create a chilly experience, here the post-human embrace promises a little more warmth. And besides, the infinite bodies of the exhibition will include the visitors, as well as the dancers from McGregor\u2019s company who will perform in the galleries of Somerset House throughout the three-month run. \u201cI think they\u2019re excited about it,\u201d says McGregor when I ask if the company might find it a chore or even an imposition to dance their way through unsuspecting crowds. \u201cI attract dancers who are intellectually and creatively curious. They are up for other things apart from being on a stage or in a rehearsal room.\u201d<\/p>\n

And visitors will be performing too, recording a few steps in a high-tech set-up, and having them played back, matched or enhanced by the McGregor AISOMA archive. \u201cI\u2019ve been giving it my best moves,\u201d says Cliff Lauson, the Somerset House curator who is responsible for getting the show on the road. At other times, dancers from McGregor\u2019s company will grab those phrases and give them a whirl, too.<\/p>\n

\"WayneWayne McGregor, photographed for the FT by Suzannah Pettigrew <\/p>\n

\u201cThe exhibition really offers a triangulation of body, movement and technology,\u201d says Lauson, who has previously curated big shows with living visual artists including Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley. \u201cIt completely subverts the monolithic characteristic of the standard art exhibition. It\u2019s alive in lots of parts. It will be different every time you visit, if you come more than once.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

But for those wanting something real, McGregor\u2019s notebooks will be on display. \u201cCambridge took all my choreographic notebooks away and analysed how I think with paper,\u201d says McGregor of a team of cognitive neuroscientists. \u201cThey offer an analogue window into my world.\u201d Who could resist taking a look?<\/p>\n

\u2018Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies\u2019, Somerset House, London, and \u2018Wayne McGregor: On The Other Earth\u2019, Stone Nest, London, October 30 to February 22 2026, somersethouse.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

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