2500Ft / Student: 1900Ft (Trafó season ticket is valid!)
Random Dance is Resident Company of Sadler’s Wells, London and Associate Company of DanceEast, Suffolk. Wayne McGregor is the Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet, Covent Garden. Wayne McGregor | Random Dance is supported by Arts Council England.
Fresh from his success at La Scala Milan, Paris Opera Ballet and Glastonbury and world-renowned for his fierce, frantic and yet tenderly unpredictable choreography, Wayne McGregor and his company Random Dance arrive at Trafó with Entity. Hyper-limber dancers move to the propulsive beats of a specially-commissioned electronic score by Coldplay and Massive Attack collaborator Jon Hopkins, alongside music for strings from award-winning composer Joby Talbot (The Divine Comedy, Chroma).
'A great sexy beast of a piece’ / The Sunday Times/
‘It looks like nothing on earth’ /The Independent on Sunday/
‘There is no other dance vocabulary like this' /The Guardian/
For the past 15 years, Random Dance, Resident Company of Sadler’s Wells, London, has researched, created and performed boundary-breaking work throughout the world. Often collaborating with a range of artists, practitioners and scientists outside of the conventional realms of making dance, their work has been radical, pioneering and risk-taking. Yet always at the centre of this interdisciplinary work is choreographer Wayne McGregor’s consuming passion for the human body and a basic desire to create visceral, physically beautiful dances that communicate powerfully and emotionally to audiences.
Random’s new project ENTITY, which premiered at Sadler’s Wells in April ‘08, continues this trail blazing convention. ENTITY, a diptych of works by visionary choreographer Wayne McGregor, pitches the rhythmic energy of Bartoks 5th String Quartet against the sonic extremes of Jon Hopkins melody-led electronica. Performed in Patrick Burnier’s Linbury Award winning design environment and lit by the unrivalled magic of Lucy Carter’s evocative imagination, ENTITY will be danced by a new look Random – 10 extraordinary classically trained, hyper-limber bodies that devour McGregor’s choreography at a cellular level.
As significantly, ENTITY is a new dance/science collaboration that has evolved from Random’s past and intimate engagement with scientific thought. AtaXia (2004 – Critics’ Circle Nomination, South Bank Show Awards Nomination), was made in collaboration with Kings College Cambridge where McGregor, an AHRB/ACE research fellow, explored with cognitive scientists the potential for a brain/body dis-coordination AND the award-winning Amu (2005 – Critics’ Circle Award) was created in partnership with the Royal Brompton Hospital’s heart imaging specialists and surgeons. For the ENTITY diptych, McGregor will collaborate with Scott deLahunta and University of California, San Diego in association with the California Institutes for Science and Innovation, The Neurosciences Institute, Salk Institute and The Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind.
Working with researchers from the interdisciplinary fields of cognitive science: psychology, neurosciences, linguistics, human-computer interaction, robotics etc, McGregor and his team will build ENTITY - a ‘learning’ agent, or collection of agents - which can generate unique solutions to choreographic problems. Whilst continually testing the capacities of the technological body in a complex cognitive and physical debate that questions the very nature of what it is to be human.
Chroma – Choreography of Wayne McGregor (in the Royal Opera House):
Direction, Choreography: Wayne McGregor
Dancers:
Neil Fleming Brown, Catarina Carvalho, Agnès López Rio, Paolo Mangiola, Ángel Martinez Hernandez, Anh Ngoc Nguyen, Anna Nowak, Maxime Thomas, Antoine Vereecken, Jessica M Wright
Rehearsal Director: Odette Hughes
Lighting Design: Lucy Carter
Digital Video Design: Ravi Deepres
Set and Costume Design: Patrick Burnier
Technical Director: Christopher Charles
Original Music: Joby Talbot/Jon Hopkins
Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, (London); Het Muziektheater, (Amsterdam), Biennal (Lyon) and DanceEast (Ipswich).
Interview mp3
The making of Entity. Watch interviews and behind the scenes footage.
In the Guardian: video and interview (Wayne McGregor, Joby Talbot, Patrick Burnier, dancers)
With the support of:
