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Calling Sir Wayne McGregor a choreographer is like calling Stanley Kubrick a director. Correct of course, but it hardly begins to capture the totality of their auteur approach. One of the most fascinating parts of this exciting exhibition at Somerset House is the look inside McGregor’s studio, where you see glimpses into his notebooks and how he annotates his choreography like musical notations. He records and files his work in archives. One notebook shows him methodically analysing the suicide of Francis Bacon’s lover/muse George Dyer on the eve of an exhibition in Paris, and how Bacon didn’t react when told; how would you turn this moment into dance? Well, there is literally method to McGregor’s madness, the kind of madness — which in the pre-TikTok days used to be called intellectualism — that possessed Kubrick. And technology is not feared but harnessed. Which is where we find ourselves with Infinite Bodies, an exhibition that showcases an artistic vision fulfilled through an expansive approach to collaboration and new tech to create an experience which is frequently exhilarating and rewards participation; yes, you should be prepared for a bit of a dance. The first work here is a new piece called OMNI, which he made with George Lucas’s SFX company Industrial Light & Magic, who he previously worked with on ABBA Voyage. It has simulations of two dancers moving together across a shifting void space. Using performance capture tech, their bodies shift in transparency, so that we are seeing skeletons or cardio-vascular systems moving together in constant flux. Shown on a screen in life-sized scale, it makes for a hypnotic piece that has more physicality than your average CGI; things have come a long way since Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Further cutting-edge exploration comes in a piece called Future Self, developed by McGregor with digital contemporary art group Random International, with a soundtrack by Max Richter. It’s an interactive one, a “living” sculpture made of a brass grid made up of 10,000 LED lights. When you approach it — and ideally dance — it lights up to echo your movements, which sounds simple but feels uniquely satisfying and uncanny in this set-up, effectively showing your body moving without its physicality. It’s like staring at your soul or, perhaps, your digital afterlife. What McGregor is exploring are notions of physical intelligence, something existing beneath IQ and EQ — with the emphasis on beneath, for this form of intelligence is usually taken for granted. Infinite Bodies could easily have been an apocalyptic attack on digital society at the further expense of our bodies, but McGregor has more of an intelligent approach, questioning what the human body means in the age of AI, and looking to the future when our daily lives may involve living in both the virtual and physical realms. For all the future optimism, there’s an unnerving edge to these exhibits too. In Audience, 64 glass mirrors sit in a room and when you walk into it, they all turn towards you. It’s funny and disturbing, a pithy joke about our need to be seen — or rather, in the social media world, to see ourselves reflected back by others as we wish. Not all of it works. AISOMA, made with Google Arts & Culture Lab, encourages you stand in front of a screen and dance for eight seconds. You have your movements analysed, and the system will then draw from McGregor’s archives to replay suggested extra moves for you to try. It’s clunky and unsatisfying, your on-screen avatar a mere wire outline; plus the top suggestions for your next moves prove quite difficult (my spine would have cracked). Oddly, but excitingly for those who love an adventure, the climax to the exhibition doesn’t happen at Somerset House, but off-site at Stone Nest in the West End, a venue of sufficient size to host something spectacular. Called On the Other Earth, it allows you to walk inside a huge, totally immersive 360-degree screen, putting you into the heart of a succession of scenes featuring dancers from McGregor’s company, which are both intimate and, as you stand on top of a building, frequently exhilarating. Digital art bringing a physical rush? Or physical art bringing a digital rush? The future is convincingly being pulled into focus here, and it’s weirdly reassuring, if just for the fact you know McGregor has worked out a system to shut down the Terminators. Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies is at Somerset House until February 22
