Autobiography. Choreographic Work. Co-produced by Sadler’s Wells, London, UK; Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg; Edinburgh International Festival, UK; Festspielhaus St Pölten, Austria; Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Movimentos Festwochen der Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany. Co-commissioned by West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong; Festival Diaghilev. P.S., St Petersburg, Russia; Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Guimarães, Portugal; Seattle Theatre Group, USA (music). Supported by The Monument Trust, in partnership with Wellcome Genomics Campus, Wellcome Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute.
- Submitting institution
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Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- McGregor4
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Sadler's Wells, London
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first performance
- October
- Year of first performance
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Autobiography was an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life and writing, a non-linear approach to a life story refracting both remembered pasts and speculative futures.
I begin by working with my dancers to create choreography from old writings, personal memories, pieces of art and music that have been important in my life. From these elements, 23 sections of movement material were created, reflecting the 23 pairs of chromosomes of the human genome. The choreographic events from the 23 sections were then fed into an algorithm based on my genetic code. For every performance the algorithm, developed in collaboration with Nick Rothwell, randomly selects a different section of code from this genome to determine which material the audience will see and in which order the dancers will perform it, book-ended by a fixed beginning and end.
Using direct private sources of my life to fuel the studio creation process was new to me. Sharing personal writing, diaries, meaningful photographs of key emotional experiences and influences/influencers in my life story was exposing and challenging. The nature of our studio collaboration morphed as a result of the stimuli. The tasks were often more somatic, emotion based and asked us all to journey deep into our own biography. We worked on stripping back the rational and encouraged the intuitive dance making, primed by un-surfacing the layers of makes us who we are as a breathing, living, physical entity. Aware of breaking my own compositional habits, we devised the automatic structuring tool for the work to take away my own control of the material; this would order the sections, but would also decide on who dances, what they dance and even within sections change the nature of the choreographic object for each performance.
https://waynemcgregor.com/productions/autobiography
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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