"FAR"
As the Resident Choreographer of London’s Royal Ballet, Wayne McGregor’s merit is reasonably uncontroversial, but his avant-garde work with his own Random Dance company can really get under people’s skin. Some take issue with the alleged ungainliness of McGregor’s choreographic vocabulary, a fast-flowing babble of deformed but freakishly elegant movements and postures that seem to revive vestigial joints in the human body. Some find the abstract experimental music he favors too indecorous for ballet. And others just seem annoyed that McGregor got famous for integrating new media and cognitive science into dance while (the story goes) other choreographers were doing the same things better, in honorable and unjust obscurity. You can consult the comments section of virtually any review of Random Dance for examples.
All three of these constituencies would have had problems with Random Dance’s loud, ferocious, imperious performance at Reynolds Theater on February 25. But to experience FAR as an aficionado of experimental art, without any particular stake in the feuds and orthodoxies of modern dance, was to be thoroughly awed by the force and clarity of McGregor’s vision—not to mention the ingenuity of his lighting technician and the intense commitment of his dancers.
Jessica Wright (photo: Ravi Deepres)
FAR stands for Flesh in the Age of Reason, the title of Roy Porter’s seminal tome of the 18th-century Enlightenment. It was a time when we honed scalpels and ground lenses in order to excavate the mysteries of the body, the heavens, and the earth, finding secret machines everywhere we looked. Inundated with so much new empirical data, the soul had to reevaluate itself. McGregor has said that FAR brings this spirit of invasive inquiry to the creative process, hence the cognitive science research that dancer Jessica Wright discussed in our recent interview. But a dance is not a scholarly monograph, and what was theoretical for McGregor becomes purely aesthetic for us. The big themes were perceptible mainly as a residue—a sense of dialectical conflict between reason and unreason, science and religion, society and the individual, mind and body. The dancers filtered idiosyncratic personalities through the rigid sinuosity of the choreography, as though relearning how to be human after discovering that the skin concealed no divine essence, only more clockwork.
The performance began with four torches burning at the corners of the stage, to the sampled strains of something operatic that has been variously identified as Vivaldi, Verdi, and Giacomelli. I think it was Vivaldi. The torches were extinguished one by one before the shadows were blasted away by a blinding incandescence. (Read: the unsparing light of reason, blazing out of the superstitious darkness.) The light came from an ingenious apparatus designed by rAndom International: a white, rectangular panel mounted with evenly spaced pegs. At rest, it looked like a chilly modernist Pachinko machine. Activated, it resembled nothing else in the world. Many small lights in the board were operated independently, with rheostat adjustments and directional shifts creating starry, hypnotic patterns of light and shadow—and, at one point, an ominously counting-down timer.
Michael-John Harper (photo: Ravi Deepres)
The lighting risked overwhelming the dancing, in the manner of the sculpture in Chunky Move’s Connected, but didn’t, because the dancing itself was so enthrallingly strange. Instead, the chiaroscuro grandeur of the set amplified the drama of the movement, which was often expressed through intelligible configurations of one to three dancers. While it was hard to single out any weak links, Michael-John Harper was especially captivating, with his body of rubber and steel. As he shifted from utter inertia to fluid motion without any perceptible intermediate stage, it was like watching a film with frames spliced out. When he came onstage gripping the sides of his own ribcage, jerking it back and forth like a barrel carried in front of him, my eyes simply couldn’t process what they were seeing. All of the dancers breeched the normal limits of the body, but Harper was a real live alien.
Ben Frost’s concussive music seems to have been a particular point of contention in the U.K. press: it was loud and rude and not at all concerned with blending tactfully in the background. Like everything else in FAR, it alternately coiled with enigmatic menace and exploded in your face, as through someone had packed a Gavin Bryars score with gunpowder. Drawing from Frost’s usual idioms—noise music, classical minimalism, black metal, electronic ambient sound design—the score gathered the charred atmospheric fringes of the 20th century into deep, thrumming waves, grinding in and out of phase and abruptly splitting apart to disgorge mammoth riffs. Somehow, these moments enlarged the dancers rather than dwarfing them. It may have been even mightier than the music on Frost’s acclaimed album By the Throat, and we should all keep our fingers crossed that, following the likes of Max Richter’s stellar score for McGregor’s Infra, Frost’s FAR score earns an official release. In the music as in the dance, enlightenment never felt so visceral.
