Unlikely Algorithms: Choreographer Wayne McGregor Combines Biometric Data, 80's Sci-Fi, And Computerized Dance Moves

Known for his his work on Radiohead's Lotus Flower video, British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s latest dance production, “Atomos”, was heavily influenced by an iconic ‘80s sci-fi film, devised around its dancers’ biological rhythms, and developed with the help of a computer-based dancing creature known as “Becoming”.

The resulting production, which premiered at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater on October 9, consists of ten dancers whose movements are intended to evoke themes of atomization and indivisible structures, and explore the question: What is a body?

The performance is set to a live original score by neo-classical collective A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and features footage from filmmaker Ravi Deepres, lighting by Lucy Carter, and costumes by fashion technology duo Studio XO, responsible forLady Gaga’s bubble machine dress and Fergie’s OLED catsuit. Oh, and the audience views the whole thing through 3D glasses.

I gave McGregor a call to find out more about the futuristic inspirations and technological methods behind his work. He points to his long interest in cognitive science as one of many points of departure for “Atomos”, then homes in on a more specific influence. “I guess more personally, I wanted to work on cannibalizing something that was very meaningful to me,” he explains. “And so I took this very brilliant 1980s science fiction film, and used that as a way of kind of pixellating information and translating it into something else, into another world.”

Becoming, courtesy of Welcome Images.

“I’ve been trying to create a kind of computer-based dancer for about ten or eleven years,” McGregor explains. But previous iterations of his “autonomous choreographic agent” fell short, he felt, because they couldn’t bridge the digital-physical divide between computer program and human dancer. “It had to be a body, and  it had to be a body that elicited some kind of kinesthetic relationship from the dancers, in the same way that when you stand next to another body you get an energy and a charge and information from it,” he says. And so Becoming was born, an artificially intelligent “eleventh dancer” created by digital artists OpenEndedGroup.

McGregor describes Becoming as responding to data inputted by moving “all these very strange limb-like articulations”, which the dancers view on a 65-inch 3D screen during the rehearsal process. The device never appears onstage, but you can catch a glimpse of it at a Welcome Collection exhibition, on until October 27.

The team fed the computer-dancer data from McGregor’s chosen sci-fi film to respond to. He and his dancers would select one of 1200 frames from the film, and the program behind Becoming would analyze the color, shape, and motion in the clip. “That gets translated into math and algorithms that drive this creature,” says McGregor. The computerized “body” reacts in real time, never staying still and never repeating the same movement, and the dancers worked with it in a kind of human-robot dialogue, mimicking novel shapes it produced or responding to it in a duet.

Full sequence courtesy of Welcome Images.

To further explore the relationship between technology and the body, McGregor wanted to incorporate the dancers’ biometric data - anything from temperature to heart rate to arousal levels - into the choreography. Studio XO developed sensors to capture various biorhythms during rehearsals, and rendered the information into physical forms the dancers could work with. “We made these physical structures and body architectures out of materials like wood and foam, and very stretchy lycras that multiple people could get inside of, origamis that were very delicate, plastics that were faceted,” explains Studio XO’s Nancy Tilbury. While the dancers interacted with the works, the designers again monitored their biorhythms (they can’t say exactly what they measured or how, as they’re in the process of protecting the IP).

This data then informed their costume design - a collection of stretch lycra suits, digitally printed with patterned sequences of shapes and color, from blacks and greys through to reds, whites, and neon green. “The beauty’s when you take them out of order and they move around the stage, and you’ve got what we refer to as a dance glitch,” says Tilbury.

It’s a move away from the all-singing-all-dancing works the designers are best known for into the more subtle territory of wearable tech usually seen in the health and fitness arena. “I think fashion technology generally is very concerned with outputs, but we’re also obsessed with inputs - inputs being what the body broadcasts,” says Benjamin Males, the other half of Studio XO.

McGregor is keen to merge this interest in the body’s rhythms with his computer-based dancer, and has future plans to feed that biometric data into the creature’s programming. “If, for example, we could judge some levels of stress while watching Becoming, how could that then be inputted back into that mechanism to make the creature behave in a different way?” he suggests. “How could we get audiences perhaps to drive Becoming, if we ever use it actually in a performance, from their retinal action in watching something?”

Below, check out Wayne McGregor's TEDtalk: A choreographer's creative process in real time

You can also check out McGregor's work with Radiohead for [Lotus Flower](http:// http://www.randomdance.org/video/lotusflowerradiohead):

Wayne McGregor

Becoming (2013) --- Marc Downie (OpenEndedGroup) / Nick Rothwell (Cassiel); in collaboration with Wayne McGregor | Random Dance.