Bengaluru: "Don't you have any easy questions for me?" joked choreographer Wayne McGregor, as he took on the volley of questions as he arrived in Bengaluru for The MixedBody Project, in collaboration with the British Council and the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts. The remark leaps out, for nothing about McGregor is simple. Flesh in the Age of Reason, which will premiere in Bengaluru on December 6, is McGregor's return to the age of enlightenment, a period of rational thought marked by philosophers like Rene Descartes, Voltaire, Thomas Hobbes Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant.
“It was the first time autopsies were conducted on the human body, the first time the rib cage was opened up and explored without the soul jumping out at you,” said McGregor. The award-winning British choreographer and director, who is often credited with revolutionising the landscape of contemporary dance. His highly collaborative works have made forays into the worlds of science, psychology and technology, done through long relationships with experts from a number of fields. McGregor's works have been performed by the Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet and Royal Dance Ballet and have a sizeable set of accomplishments in the world of cinema too. McGregor's work in film includes Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Disney's Tarzan.
FAR, which was created in 2010, “unpeels the layers of creativity, returning to a time when scientists and artists first talked about understanding the body,” he said. “These explorations had a huge role on religion, politics and our understanding of the self.” In 2004, he was made a research fellow at the neuroscience department in Cambridge University, an association that remains to this day. "What happens in the brain when we construct meaning from things? How do I respond to stimuli and what forms appear? Neuroscience gives us different ways of understanding our physical habits and in the art of shifting attention in a way that creates perceptual richness," he remarks. The journey began earler this year, when artists from Attakkalari collaborated with Wayne McGregor on a digital dance project, as part of the British Council's UK-India 2017: Year of Culture, which includes a series of events across India as a "move to democratise creative arts in the country."
Like the school of philosophy to which McGregor pays tribute, his choreographies are intense explorations of cognition in dance. "I never studied a particular style, my learning has been intuitive. But that's the question we're asking – is dance an intuitive form of expression or is a collection of things we already know? It is a brilliant example of distributed cognition."
Flesh in the Age of Reason by Wayne McGregor will take place at Chowdiah Memorial Hall on December 6 at 7 pm.
