Wayne McGregor Employs AI In One Choreographic Work & Addresses The Climate Crisis In Another This Week @ Sadler's Wells In London

text by Lara Monro

This week, the multi-award-winning choreographer and director Wayne McGregor CBE will present Autobiography (v95 and v96) and UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey at Sadlers Wells, London. 

For over twenty five years, McGregor’s multi-dimensional choreographic work has radically redefined dance in the modern era, securing his position at the cutting edge of contemporary arts. Take, for example, his appointment as the first choreographer from a contemporary dance background to be Resident Choreographer at The Royal Ballet in 2006, where he has created over twenty productions that daringly reconfigure classical language. 

Alongside his multiple cross-sector collaborations and role at The Royal Ballet, Studio Wayne McGregor is the creative engine of his life-long enquiry into thinking through and with the body. The 30+ works created since being established in 1992 (as Random Dance) showcase the evolution of his distinctive visual style and reveal the movement possibilities of the body in ever more precise degrees of articulation. 

McGregor’s Autobiography (v95 and v96) is the latest iteration of Autobiography (1.0), a series of unique dance portraits inspired and determined by the sequencing of his own genetic code. The work upends the traditional nature of dance-making by using the new AI tool AISOMA to hijack his DNA data through its specially created algorithm, which overwrites the configurations of 100 hours+ of his choreographic learning to present fresh movement options to the performers. The meshing of artificial intelligence and instinct converge to create a totally unique dance sequence that complements the medium’s ephemeral quality. 

While v95 and v96 shines a light on the cutting edge innovation capabilities of dance and future facing technology, UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey is a moving meditation on the climate crisis. Inspired by the Jim Henson cult classic, The Dark Crystal, it depicts an Earth driven by extremes and urgently in need of healing; a modern eco-myth that asks how we can come together to be whole again. The combination of cutting-edge costumes paired with the digital landscapes creates a stunning blend of fantasy and documentary. 

Autobiography (v95 and v96) will be showcased this Tuesday and Wednesday (March 12th & 13th), while UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey will be showcased this Friday and Saturday (March 15 & 16th) at Sadlers Wells, London. 

scene from Autobiography (v95 and v96)

scene from UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey

[REVIEW] Nurturing Nature in Lost Wild: Art on the Edge of the Anthropocene @ Whitney Modern in Los Gatos

text by Chimera Mohammadi

How do we nurture the force that created us? This seemingly paradoxical question defines Lost Wild, the group show on view at the Whitney Modern in Los Gatos. The show grapples with various such paradoxes tethered to our relationship with nature: Keith Petersen’s breathtaking photography of chemical reactions claims organic aesthetics through inorganic means, and Karen Olsen-Dunn’s otherwise conventional landscapes glitch and freeze off the canvas and out of the realm of recognition. Dean Bensen and Demetra Theofanous’s glass leaves and bird nests solidify typically flexible structures into embodied fragility, reminiscent of the environmental precariousness that defines our current global epoch. After luxuriating in these contradictory states, the show sets about to address that core question of nurturing, calling in motifs of youth, restoration, and lushness. Melissa Mohammadi’s sprawling botanical studies and tunnel books house disparate plants, bound together by unlikely familial forces and working together toward healing. Tamera Avery’s tenderly rendered masked subjects are at once children and revolutionaries, often modeled after her own son. Marie Cameron’s paintings cope with climate change through a fantastical fairy tale lens, while Sheila Metcalf Tobin’s burst out of the confines of the canvas in radiant, sun-dappled celebrations of natural nostalgia.

Lost Wild is on view through March 30th at Whitney Modern, 2nd Floor of 24 N Santa Cruz Ave 2nd floor, Los Gatos, CA 95030.

A Forsaken Place: Andrea Zittel's A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future →

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan,cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles


The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth. 

Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification.  According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. Read more. Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021