Deepstaria

‍From the depths of black to the sphere of the possible

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Text of Maria Luisa Buzzi

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His art is as fast and fast-paced as his thought. A river of ideas, curiosities, brilliance Wayne McGregor, CBE of the British Empire and choreographer born in Stockport in 1970. Very young founder of Ramdom Dance, now Company Wayne McGregor with more than thirty years of life and successes behind him, the artist continues to find creative life in the futuristic Wayne McGregor Studio, since 2017 on the lively campus of Here East, in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park of the British capital, one of the most fruitful international spaces for the development of contemporary dance and the arts, a hotbed of brains and a place open to the sharing of knowledge.

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Resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet in London, a company for which he has managed to give voice to a renewal of narrative ballet with masterpieces Woolf Works and The Dante Project, Wayne McGregor includes incursions both into opera — direction and choreography of a wonderful version of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice — and into cinema (Harry Potter, The Legend of Tarzan, Audrey), in fashion (Soma for COS at Pitti Uomo), in music videos (Lotus Flower for Radiohead), all combined with an incessant experimentation with the statute of the body today and its language, defined in a new non-reductionist epistemology capable of considering in an integrated way the biological plane with the technological and aesthetic one. Requested choreographer at all corners of the globe with titles in the repertoires of the world's major ballet companies, it is at his headquarters in London that the experimentation becomes more decisive. He tried his hand at installations with drones guided by algorithms (+/-Human), McGregor experimented with the expansion of the physical body into the metaverse and in the encounter with neuroscience; he choreographed the sequencing of his genetic code in the seminal Autobiography (2017), Danza&Danza Award from Italian critics for “best production of the year”. A road marked by a youthful solo Cyborg to which he responds forty years later by exploring choreographic composition in relation to the frontiers of artificial intelligence, driven by the unsolved mysteries of physics and astrophysics.

Move from here Deepstaria, whose Italian debut takes place in Spoleto a few days before the world premiere at the Montpellier Danse Festival. A work that promises to open a dialogue on the rapid changes of our time to trigger in the spectator that “crisis of meaning” desired in every artistic event that wants to be defined as such. Flanked by an exceptional creative team including the Oscar-winning sound designer Nicolas Becker, the music producer LEXX co-inventor of Bronze AI, the lighting designer Theresa Baumgartner and the faithful playwright Uzma Hameed, McGregor tries from the depths to plunge into the future, and we follow him in his daring experiments, trusting his words, while he tells us about the project still in progress. Although the title Deepstaria You refer to a primitive single-celled organism — the jellyfish of the Ulmaridae family — it is in the NASA quote that acts as an ex-ergo to the theatrical work that the key to understanding must be sought: Deep sea and deep space are not as different as you think, the sea and space depths are not as different as you think. What should we expect then? “The quote reminds me of many associations,” confesses the choreographer. “Adventure, courage, vision. It projects us into the unknown, into technological innovation, into human ingenuity, or into the sphere of the Possible. Traveling beyond ourselves, we seek knowledge to illuminate and develop our human condition. At the same time, these spaces of infinite black, similar to the womb, are strangely familiar. It is as if they awaken forgotten connections deep within ourselves, echoes perhaps of unconscious states of the being of the past... or perhaps of tomorrow? Just think of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, located billions of kilometers from Earth for years, which, after a period of signal interruption, began to transmit data to NASA again. It has been orbiting in interstellar space for more than 40 years... Incredible, indeed, impressive.”

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To remain among “the potential of the Possible”, the choreographer imagines Deepstaria in the form of a diptych, with a first part in turn divided. The show danced live by the Wayne McGregor Company on stage, where technology recalibrates and “disturbs” the live relationship between sound and dance, is accompanied by the eternal digital twin, Deepstaria Immortal, created with the pioneer of digital media and motion graphics Tobias Gremmler, broadcast in live streaming by Studio Wayne McGregor in London (www.waynemcgregor.com). The play together with the digital work that expresses the fundamentals of choreography in new ways using evolutionary algorithms, motion capture and animation to create surreal bodies, fantastic jellyfish, which are transformed and grow into an infinite choreographic work, share the same conceptual DNA. “These are two complete works in themselves,” McGregor explains, “it is not necessary to experiment with the digital version to enjoy the live production or vice versa. But it's as if the physical and digital realms were connected by an ethereal umbilical cord.” It is certain that Artificial Intelligence plays a leading role on stage with the bodies of the company's nine dancers emerging in a space-time that smells like a black hole, a set created by Benjamin Males with Vantablack, the material composed of carbon nanotubes, the deepest black that exists, known in the artistic field for the exclusive use so far of Anish Kapoor in his works. The sound system on which these bodies develop and move depends on innovative technological experimentation with AI: the music of the foley artist and Oscar winner of films such as The Sound of Metal (2019) Nicolas Becker is developed by Bronze AI, the composition and arrangement platform created by the music producer LEXX, capable of continuously composing and performing music in real time. “Becker's work as a noise maker intrigued me a lot,” McGregor says, “so I became interested in how his research as a sound engineer could be combined with movement and, thanks to AI, his samples have become a phenomenal score that is never repeated. With Becker, a dreamlike soundscape was born in a state of constant change. No play will be the same as the next one. You will always have a unique opera experience.” A way to reconfigure the relationship between live dance and music in real time, to make AI in all respects a collaborative performer, fortunately still at the service of human creativity, as the author reassures us: “Recently for some of my works I used AISOMA, an AI tool created in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture to explore and test the development of the movement material created during the rehearsals and the creation process. These were extraordinary and very fruitful experiments, which convinced me and my collaborators that artificial intelligence and machine learning can have a valid and dynamic place in the creative process, not as substitutes for flesh-and-blood dancers, imagination and creativity, but as augmented collaborators, able to expand possibilities, allowing us to see movement in new and stimulating ways. In the past we have experimented with algorithms extracted from my DNA to structure the dance in real time, which has meant that the dancers have never performed the show with the same choreographic score for more than one hundred performances. Terrifying and exciting in equal measure! Our relationship with AI is blurred: one of the most surprising advantages of having used Bronze AI in Deepstaria is that, as a creator, you have great control and influence over its behavior; as if it were an extra dancer, with its voice and its peculiarities, it has given us access to relationships of movement and sound that we could not have imagined without it. New eyes and ears, therefore new inputs, with which to work at a performative level.”
Therefore, in the show, the pre-recorded sound will be performed and experienced live, just like the choreographic score interpreted with individual freedom at each performance starting from the pre-established structure. A return to the origins, with an eye to the future, where the symbiotic relationship between the moving body and the acoustic environment was still close.
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All we have to do is stay in tune with the unstoppable Wayne while waiting for the second part of the diptych, scheduled for summer 2025 in Hong Kong: On the Other Earth, a performance installation in which the audience is at the center of the action, immersed in a 360-degree LED screen — the brand new Future Cinema System designed by Professor Jeffrey Shaw — the world's first interactive post-cinema screen. Thanks to 3D visualization, augmented reality, AI, machine learning, spatial processing, retina and motion tracking technologies, the public will control their journey by collaborating on the composition of the work with their body. “The gamification, if I may say so, of a theatrical experience fascinates me,” concludes Wayne McGregor. “This diptych brings us closer than ever to real immersion.”