Ataxia

Wayne McGregor's new work was inspired by work he and his dancers did around psychology and neuroscience.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

BULL:
I think it's important to see this work in the context of what Wayne's always tried to do. I think it would be a mistake to look at this and say, oh his interest is suddenly in dysfunctional movement. That's what Wayne does. The brain is a fascinating thing as an audience member, the brain loves symmetry, it loves balance. It loves your gardens with one hedge on each side. But it also loves it when things happen not as expected. Your brain is immediately alert, something goes where you don't think it's going to be, it's got a different energy, your brain is alert, switched on, but it's also vaguely unsettled. That's what Wayne is trying to do. He doesn't want you to be comfortable in the audience.

WARK:
But the dancers are so highly disciplined, and yet they're portraying something that cannot be disciplined?

BULL:
They're not portraying ataxia. They're absolutely not. Wayne's taking that idea as a starting point for choreography, which is every bit as disciplined as the choreography dancers always do.

GREER:
I'd never seen his work before so I didn't know what I was coming to see. It was very challenging, it was very brutal, it demands a lot out of you. You are not warned about what are you're going to see, what you're going to hear. It's exactly what I think art should do. Art should make you sit there and actually challenge you, and the challenge itself becomes a kind of symmetry. And it's a kind of beauty that is very moving piece of work. I really loved it.

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
The thing I thought was odd about it is it's incredibly engaging and very, very intense, and fascinating. I too hadn't seen his work before. And then suddenly halfway through you get this video which seemed to me entirely irrelevant and breaks the whole sense of concentration. And actually you never completely recover it again, I found.

GREER:
I think to answer that, to go back to what Deborah is saying, the brain does try and make symmetry, so we are trying all the time - we are working all the time to make this space work, so he breaks it immediately like that.

WARK:
But he did break it for quite a long time. In a sense did the multimedia experience add to the dance for you?

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
No, I found it, as a pure dance, I thought it was incredible exciting, because you are extremely engaged, and you know that it's not that long. And that you're incredible engaged. And then suddenly it breaks off and it had back projections, so you get a very intense light in your face, and I found that terribly unsettling and redundant.

WARK:
Do you think one of the more moving bits, particularly in the duet, where the dancers very much appear to be helping each other, stroking each other, supporting each other?

BULL:
Wayne's dancers always seem to defy nature. They do extraordinary things. They go ways the body doesn't appear to be able to go. But what's really interesting here is that they give in to nature. But not nature at its most beautiful and celebrated, they give in to nature at its cruellest. And the sight of them at the end, Odette's the final dancer to be moving, and the lights go out while she's still trying, she's still trying to do it. She's battling on with something. I found that incredibly moving.

GREER:
And the intricacy of the movements, there are bodies where the looks as if it's - look as if they're in spasm. You know they're not, but that they are, and so it's that sort of relaxing into his narrative, which is the big challenge, I think.

WARK:
What did you make of the audience, because I thought there was a fantastic range in the audience, and an incredible amount of really, really young, like 15 to 20-year-olds.

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
It felt like a cult thing. I mean, it felt like something where people who follow contemporary dance...

BULL:
1,600 people a night is a bit bigger than cult.

SAUMAREZ SMITH:
No, I wasn't saying that in a bad way. I just felt I came into something where he had a great following. And I felt badly that I wasn't familiar with it. But I felt everybody was waiting to see it.

GREER:
I'm glad I joined.