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 Techno
Dance
By Cheryl Ossola
Choreographer Wayne McGregor connects kids with dance through
technology
Wayne McGregor is as passionate a man as you’ll hope to find
among choreographers. Cerebral and articulate, he is as much
an intellectual as an artist. Although making dances is his
lifeblood, McGregor desperately wants young people to learn,
and he’s using dance in a unique way to make that happen in
England’s public schools. With his company, Random Dance, he
has established technologically based dance outreach education
programs that get young people thinking and lead them to
self-discovery. The students learn about dance, but more
important in McGregor’s mind, they learn about themselves and
how to function in the world.
British-born McGregor, a tall, 37- year-old whip of a fellow,
founded his modern-dance company in 1992, after obtaining a
degree in choreography from England’s University College,
Bretton Hall, and training at the Merce Cunningham and José
Limón schools. Random Dance has been the resident company at
Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London since 2001, and last December
McGregor was named choreographer in residence at The Royal
Ballet (the first non-ballet–trained choreographer to hold
that post). Despite holding such high-profi le positions, he
devotes a huge amount of energy to developing programs that
bring dance to hundreds of British schoolchildren.
McGregor prefers to take his programs into schools where kids
haven’t had a lot of exposure to dance. His goal is to
“explore artistic excellence. The projects might have some
social repercussions, but that’s not our focus,” he says.
Instead, he says he’s more interested in “developing nonverbal
literacy” in young people. To do that, you have to approach
kids on their level. “Say some 7-year-olds see a ballet of
mine, which is quite difficult and abstract,” McGregor
explains. “A teacher might ask them what it means, and the
kids have no idea. So they think, ‘I don’t get dance. Dance
isn’t for me.’ So when we work with these little kids, we say,
‘What do you see? What color is it? How does it make you
feel?’ And all of a sudden meaning emerges, and it’s so
liberating for them. And that applies to lots of situations,
not just dance—situations in real life. It’s not just for
dance; it’s a way of looking at things.”
To make dance appealing to a broad range of personalities
means presenting it as more than technique. “The joy you get
in the freedom of moving, that physical exhilaration— that’s
the hook,” says McGregor. “And once you’ve got [students]
hooked, you can invest in the techniques.” He
finds that the black sheep of the classroom often yield the
most potential. “You want to work with people who ar e
curious and a bit restless and bored. We’ve found that they
really engage,” he says. “Even if they don’t engage with the
fact that they’re dancing, they like that they’re doing
something well and they’re valued for it. And that then helps
them to do other things well.”
Technology is a large factor in helping students engage.
McGregor utilizes a software program called Poser, which is
used to animate bodies for videogames. What interests the
choreographer most is that the animated bodies can do things
that real ones can’t: Heads can swivel 360 degrees; arms can
be dislocated. “We took 10 or 11 computers into the studio and
I taught the students the basics of animation,” McGregor says.
“They learned about how a time line works, how a key frame of
action works over a period of time, and how the transitions
between movements work—all choreographic principles. So I was
looking from a choreographic eye but teaching through
animation.”
But for McGregor the most rewarding result of working with
Poser was that the students wanted to try to do what they had
made. “As soon as you get them trying those physically
impossible things, you’re dealing with choreography. ‘OK, your
head can’t go 360 degrees—how could you work with two people
to make it look as though it can? OK, your arm doesn’t
dislocate that far off your shoulder—how can you work with a
group of five people to get that same kind of effect?’ It
works so well,” he says. And once he’s gotten the students’
attention, he says, “you can do anything with them. Then you
can look at how composition and choreography really work.
We’ve invented strategies that approach dance in a different
way, because choreography is not just about what the body
does; it’s about understanding how you look at things.”
One of McGregor’s biggest educational ventures is the 10-week
Sentient Net project, which reaches 30 schools at a time
through live video feeds of McGregor teaching at Sadler’s
Wells and is linked to the company’s piece for children,
Alpha. (His goal is to put the program into every public
school in Englan d.)
His dancers go into the schools to work with teachers and
students as they follow McGregor through a warm-up and a
series of choreographic tasks. Then they work on their own to
develop the material they’ve learned into a dance. “Some of
the
teachers were worried that [working remotely] would make young
people less attentive, but actually it was the opposite. They
understand what ‘live’ is. And the power of live is very
important; it’s not like sticking on a video,” says McGregor.
Once the remote teaching is done, company members go into the
participating schools, where they put together a dance from
the material the students have created. To complete the
project, the students perform their dance onstage before a
Random Dance performance of Alpha.
The company developed a website (www.randomdance.org/project_
alpha) where teachers can see the lesson plans, replay the
classes, and get more information. The lessons are tied into
the national curriculum so that teachers can use dance to
teach concepts in any subject—geography, math, history—you
name it. “Teachers don’t normally think about how dance can
help math or geography,” says McGregor. “But [dance is] not
taking time out from geography; it’s actually advancing their
geographic knowledge”—for example, about contours of space,
proximity, or distance—“through choreography. It gives
teachers a way to be engaged with art.”
According to Random’s co-director of education, Jasmine
Wilson, programs like Sentient Net have “a tangible impact on
participants and their teachers, whether through offering
cross-curricular resources, access to innovative technology,
or simply the highest quality artistic experience.” She says
that teachers report results like a greater interest in dance
and the performing arts, increased self-esteem, and behavioral
improvements among their students.
One of the schoolteachers, Caroline Hayward of Lethbridge
Primary School, Swindon, Wiltshire, whose students ranged in
age from 9 to 11, describes the experience as “inspirational.
The high standards and focus were remarkable. It’s one of the
rare companies that can technically stretch quite young
students and not give a one-size-fits-all workshop. We did
have times when my colleagues and I were desperately trying to
connect to our live Web access while the dancers were warming
up in one corner. There were, predictably, a few light-bulb
jokes!”
Thirteen-year-old Evangeline Asio- Okwalinga, who had taken
some dance classes outside of school, says that McGregor’s
style of movement took her by surprise. But, she says, “as the
weeks passed it became more interesting, and I got more used
to it. We used different techniques, developing ideas and
using things like changing direction or levels, adding a
movement, using dynamics.” She credits those elements with
making the students’ dances
 more
“interesting and flowing” and found that using a computer
program helped the students develop choreographic ideas. “By
the end of the project, my view of contemporary dance had
widened,” she says. “I was surprised at the amount of
choreography that had been produced from a few ideas.”
McGregor stayed true to his preference for working with
untrained youngsters when he choreographed the dances for the
Hogwarts holiday ball in Harry Potter and the Goblet of
Fire. He asked the producers if he could recruit students
from a low-income area of East London for the movie—he wanted
the professional actors to be extras and the East London kids
to do the dancing. “And they went for it!” McGregor exclaims.
“We did a series of workshops and I took the most committed
kids, even if they weren’t very good. And it was just
wonderful.”
Though producing professional dancers is not his primary goal,
some of the kids who have experienced McGregor’s programs have
become dancers. One of them, Thomasin Gülgec, worked with the
choreographer as a young teenager, then went to the Ballet
Rambert school and later joined that company. In what McGregor
calls “a fantastic kind of full circle,” Gülgec made his
professional debut, taking over a role at the last minute, in
a production of McGregor’s Presentient at Rambert.
“He’s having such an amazing career now,” says the
choreographer. “That [kind of] journey is so inspiring and
empowering. If you can catch young people at the right time,
and give them a feel for how wonderful dance is and how
exceptional it is to be involved in it, they can realize their
dreams. That’s why we do this work.”
Photo captions (from top to bottom):
More than 80 students participated in the workshops that
culminated in a performance of Castlescape. Photo by Pau Ross
Random Dance artistic director and passionate educator Wayne
McGregor. Photo by Nick Mead
McGregor’s Alpha, a work directed at children ages 8 and up,
explores concepts of sustainable living and technology’s
effects on the natural world. Photo by Ravi Deepres
Random Dance’s Odette Hughes demonstrates a lift to students
in rehearsals for the Castlescape outreach project. Photo by
Pau Ross
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