The Most Talented Chroeographer EVER...

...is Wayne McGregor.

I had the opportunity to intern for McGregor's dance company, Random, while I was studying abroad in London during college. I was living a dancer's dream there, commuting by Tube to Sadler's Wells Theatre by day, where Random is the resident company, and taking classes by night at Pineapple Dance Studio in the quaint Covent Garden. I was amazed with McGregor's talent then, and continue to be consumed with wonderment with every project he takes part in, which most recently was for the opening ceremonies of the World Swimming Championships in Rome:



McGregor's style, one that I believe competes to being the most unique and artistic of our time, is to use dance as a way embrace, question, and challenge aspects of being human. This perspective on dance as an organic art form along with a voluminous confidence (in personality and in the work) is one of the most appealing aspects, to me, about McGregor's work. I can't get enough of this guy. I want to drink him in, in ridiculous hope that some residue of his gold (which everything he puts his mind to turns into) will pool up in my gut, constructing a temple of genius there, so that I may become an enlightened (or golden), McGregorite. One blogger describes seeing his work for the first time in Proprius, a dance including London school kids age 8-14:

Wayne’s movement style is very familiar to me – a way of doing trust falls, of lifting and carrying other dancers, of turning people using your heels, of balancing in a way that’s just not quite standard in modern dance – a way I find far more intimate and involved than most modern dance, and certainly ballet – that totally says, “This is something Wayne McGregor created.” It’s a language that is as clearly itself as Chinese or Japanese – I would never mistake it for Korean just because it was in a different context. And it’s difficult, and it’s, I think, not something people wrap their heads around easily – it doesn’t really have a basis in the “language of dance” that people outside of modern dance aficionados have in their heads (think of ballroom dancing or club dancing or even how people dance in musicals – it’s not modern dance at all).

I agree that his work is a recognizable language, and would argue that it is modern dance, possibly postmodern. A world in which movement is art and life informs the dance.

Years ago when I was the intern, I remember much of McGregor's choreography was influenced and inspired by computer software programs that bend the body, on screen, in impossible and unthinkable ways. McGregor's recipe for choreography also adds quality dancers with strong, very thin and flexible bodies, music and sounds by Scanner, and a splash of artistic lighting. The result is genius.