Yulia Yurchak | Wayne McGregor "Chroma"

In the genre of modern plotless ballet, there is still a kind of plot (as a semantic core), but it is conditional, not narrative, and does not reflect external events, but is based on figurative-substantive, internal events.
Let us consider the features of conditional-plot ballet using the example of two productions of “Chroma” by British choreographer Wayne McGregor for the Royal Opera House in London. “Chroma” by Wayne McGregor is a one-act ballet, which is the first part of the ballet trilogy “Chroma-Infra-Limen”. The name “Chroma” itself denotes the quality or intensity of color. The names of the other parts of the trilogy are also subject to decoding. Infra is a Latin word, translated as “below” or “look below”. That is, look for what is under the shell inside a person. Limen - entrance, door, border, threshold.
An important semantic load is carried by light and sound, which are also an integral part of the choreographic idea. The Random company, which produced this ballet, was founded in 1992 and has gained international recognition due to its original works, fantastic aesthetics, and high-class dancers. The company's achievements in this area were recognized by the English Arts Council (The Art Council of England), which awarded Random Dance the Breakthrough Award in 2000.Let's turn to the choreographer's biography for a deeper understanding of the features of this production.
Wayne McGregor is an English choreographer, the inventor of avant-garde choreography, based on the use of computer technology, original music, and design elements.Born in 1970 in Stockport (UK). He studied dance at Bretton Hall College, University of Leeds, and at the Jose Limon School in New York. In 1992, he became a resident choreographer at the Place Contemporary Dance Centre in London and, in the same year, founded his own company, Random Dance. McGregor's company was one of many small British companies that emerged in the 1990s. However, McGregor's style has two essential features. Firstly, a unique and diverse vocabulary, due to the peculiarities of the structure of his body, elongated, thin, and flexible, and his ability to capture movements on the verge of sharpness and speed. McGregor's dance combines two extremes - on the one hand, broken, small, awkward plasticity and on the other, smoothness and fluidity, tight coupling of one movement with another. The second difference was the widespread use of new technologies. McGregor began interacting with computers at the age of seven, and it was natural for him to use computer technology in his productions. Working with contemporary designers, he experimented with creating virtual images on stage. In his work Sulphur 16 (1998), artists were dwarfed by the presence of shimmering virtual giants and danced in the company of "digital" figures that glided, shimmering between them, like aliens from other worlds. In his work Aeon (2000), computer landscapes transported dancers to other, unearthly dimensions. McGregor also uses technical advances to change the conditions of viewing his works. 53 Bytes (1997) was created for parallel performances by two casts in Berlin and Canada, and was viewed simultaneously by audiences in both countries via a video bridge. In 2000, McGregor set out to reach a global audience by live-streaming his “Installation Trilogy” on the Internet and exploring how dance could be transformed by new technologies. McGregor is actively developing the idea of physical (kinesthetic) thinking. One of the central ideas of his choreography is the exploration of space and its illumination through his actions. He thinks of the body as an architectural object; the dancers cease to be people, and they become pure lines. The result is “thought architecture.”
The technology of the dancing body has always interested him no less than the computer. Thus, the impetus for the creation of the opus “AtaXia” (Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance, 2004) came from the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University, where McGregor, as a research fellow, was involved in research into the interaction of body and mind, since dancers themselves are qualified coordinators of this interaction. However, it was in the process of this work that McGregor was struck by the energy and beauty of neurological dysfunction. Creating “Amu” (2005), he continued his interaction with science: he worked in collaboration with specialists who form the image of the heart, and with his typical set of artists, exploring both the physical properties and the symbolic resonance of the human heart. “Chroma” is an experiment on the physical capabilities of the human body. It features a sophisticated plasticity with extreme inversions of the joints, when the dancers perform unnatural movements, as if their bodies were confronting an alien, alien environment with other physical laws and movement tasks. For example, the arm swings here are made from the shoulder joint, after which the other shoulder is set in motion, and the entire body bends behind the shoulders. The result is a wave-like movement, and this undulation is transmitted to the entire body. An unfamiliar choreographic language is laid on the juicy, sharp, and sometimes disturbing music of Joby Talbot, and as a result, a kind of restless aura comes out of the action, sometimes even aggressive, pulsating, with sharp emotional angles.
The ballet has a powerful visual concept. The Greek word “chroma” itself means “color”, but in the performance, the colorful diversity of the universe is revealed by minimalist means. The spectator sees dancers, 6 boys and 4 girls, dressed in the same body-colored leotards, but of different shades, matched to the color of their skin and hair. The character of the character, his unique individuality, is revealed here through a barely noticeable shade of color. Thus, the awareness of shade halftones comes: even minor differences can form a harmonious combination or repel each other, which is further expressed in the choreographic language of dance. Ballet pushes us to think about the importance of the small, makes us look more closely at the world around us, and asks us not to chase contrasts, in the rapid change of which emotions and feelings get tired and wear out.
Another minimalist tool for McGregor was John Pawson's Zen-like construction in the form of a rectangular opening in a white wall. The background of the opening glowed bright white, then turned black. The only color here was the color of the dancers' bodies. They seemed to float in the void, appearing from nowhere and going nowhere.
Joby Talbot is a modern and quite young composer (born in 1977). His specialty is music for films and dance productions.Four of Talbot's original compositions, along with three of his arrangements of songs by The White Stripes, were all reworked to create a score for choreographer Wayne McGregor in 2006 for the ballet Chroma for The Royal Ballet.
The structure of the ballet includes 7 numbers:1. Aluminum (arrangement)2. Cloudpark3. The Hardest Button to Button (arrangement)4. Blue Orchid (arrangement)5. “…A yellow disc rising from the sea…”6. Transit of Venus7. Hovercraft
Joby Talbot’s music is a combination of original arrangements of songs by the popular band “White Stripes” and original orchestral numbers. “The Hardest Button to Button” is one of the central episodes, with the most intense movement. Although the original version of “White Stripes”, like most of their songs, sounds only in the performance of voice, drums, and one guitar, the song (like the ballet) combines aspects of minimalism with extreme and powerful effects: repetitions in it form a strong and powerful crescendo. The expanded composition of the orchestra enhances this effect. While preserving the style of the song, it is given a new, bizarre form.Even more radical is the way the choreography recreates the ballet tradition. Remnants of classical duet technique are revealed in the usual pas de deux, while imbued with a new lexicon of movement. These new movements and gestures – for example, the strange turns of the dancer not on her toes but on her full foot, or the sudden synchronized lunges to the floor – require the utmost precision, control, and flexibility, just like the movements of classical choreography. Working with and against tradition, “Chroma” recreates what the art form can do.
The range of emotions in ballet ranges from heavy to soft, from the ostentatious-bizarre to the hidden-intimate. This happens in the movements – sharp, aggressive numbers alternate with softer ones, and also on a smaller scale, from step to step, from gesture to gesture: in “The Hardest Button to Button” the dancers sometimes move at an accelerated pace, and then suddenly switch to a graceful, slow style. The relationship between the couple is also unstable, with moments of tenderness as frequent as outbursts of hostility.
In his productions, McGregor actively seeks to disrupt the boundaries of the space in which the body operates. Every intervention, every addition is an attempt by the choreographer to see the body on stage in a new or unusual context.John Pawson’s sets and constructions, designed to define the space for what is happening on stage, blur the boundaries of that space. This potential “space of freedom” is an extraordinary environment for new choreography, where the grammar and articulation of the body become crystal clear and graphic. This is a space where the body becomes completely architectural, that is, it turns into an art object. White color prevails on the stage; everything happens on a white background, and the costumes only differ slightly in tones. At the same time, the play of light and the play of plastic together create the effect of an action that breaks out of itself. Internal movement on a white background gives a greater internal contrast than the color of the costume or anything else.McGregor believes that ballet is one of the forms of modern art and its language is constantly changing; there are no fixed once and for all norms and rules in it. What was good ten years ago must give way to the new.
According to the choreographer, technologies allow us to reveal the best that is in the human body. In all his recent works, he tries to use the latest achievements of modern science in the creative process - even those that at first glance seem to have no relation to art in general and dance in particular. Thus, in "Atomos", he worked with biometric data: while writing this performance, he studied the algorithms of human behavior in various situations and psycho-emotional states with the dancers.For McGregor, dance is the generation of impulses. An impulse is the connection between the psyche and movement. Today, devices have already been invented that can look inside the body. A biometric armband allows you to find out how much adrenaline is released in the blood during a particular movement. Sensors show how consciousness reacts to a bodily impulse, recording nervous irritation at any plastic nuance. These data allow us to assess the emotional level that a person broadcasts externally. Dance is the "speech" of the body.
The subject of modern art, the choreographer himself believes, should be the deep connection between the processes occurring inside the human body and the technologies that make their essence visible. Modern man broadcasts information about himself, his momentary impressions and feelings via Facebook, Instagram, every minute, and it is necessary to explore this fundamentally new situation in the life of mankind. It would be interesting, says McGregor, to stage a performance in which all the spectators would wear biometric bracelets: the counters would broadcast information about what exactly inspires or inspires the audience in what is happening on stage (the same "like" - only more direct), and the artists would interact in different ways with the audience's reaction to what they saw. Technologies open up exceptional opportunities for him as a choreographer to build the drama of a performance: the key task that he wants to try to solve in the coming years is how to more directly connect art in general and ballet in particular with human physiology.
Thus, in a plotless ballet, the genre is modified, it develops new rules, and the specifics of its content. In this production, it is the choreography that decides the genre form of the ballet. Here, the genre idea is determined not by the musical concept but by the spectacular and scenographic series. The main genre factor becomes the spectacular; visualization comes to the fore.