Wayne McGregor’s titles are rarely straightforward. Compared with works such as Tetractys, Infra and Obsidian Tear, his latest show, Autobiography, sounds pretty unambiguous. It is however entirely typical of him that the piece owes very little to the conventions of personal memoir and that its starting point is the science of genetics.
Fascinated by the notion that every cell in his body contains the biochemical blueprint of his life, McGregor began this project by having his individual genome sequenced by scientists. That sequence was then converted to a computer algorithm, which determines the ordering of 23 dance sections that make up Autobiography – the dancers perform a different selection every night.
In theory, the science is great. I’m happily boggled by the mix of magical and scientific thinking that has allowed McGregor’s genes to take control of his choreography. But in the theatre its impact is hard to quantify. What is far more interesting is the number of tantalisingly personal moments McGregor has allowed to filter into his material. Each of the sections addresses a different element or chapter in a human life: nature, instinct, nurture and so on. And while little in Autobiography amounts to self-revelation, some of the choreography feels very new for McGregor – slower, more inwardly drawn – and hints at possibilities of storytelling and expression that he has not yet got the measure of.
The opening section, titled Avatar, is mysteriously beautiful. A lone male dancer, caught in a drift of softly illuminated smoke, moves fluidly, with almost incantatory concentration. His body spirals and folds to the electronic drones and spangles of Jlin’s accompanying score. A later section confronts the issue of ageing through a dance of gently supported duets and quietly measured configurations; another illustrates the act of memory in a haunting choreography of stillness, the dancers pressed close to the floor or lost in the moment of a long suspended balance.
McGregor’s cast serve this material superbly, with miracles of poise and expertise. In a section entitled Sleep, the aluminium geometries of Ben Cullen Williams’ décor are drenched with restless moody colours by lighting designer Lucy Carter, working her usual magic. In the closing section, Choosing, epic planes of light fan out across the auditorium, the dancers forging tentative partnerships that gradually dissolve into emptiness, leaving a solitary woman dancing against shadows.
It’s a fabulously evocative image, yet it is offset by all those sections where McGregor’s choreography defaults to his most familiarly abstract, frenetic mode. Some of the fault lies with Jlin’s score which, although lyrical at moments, too often reverts to an alienating, strafing wall of sound. But it’s the curiously frustrating dance that McGregor enacts with his personal history, the emotional revelations confined within the choreography of ideas, that makes Autobiography feel at once both incredibly rich and perversely sparse.
- At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 7 October. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
