The object of their study was notoriously elusive: dance and the process of choreographic creation.
What happens, they wondered, when choreographer Wayne McGregor creates movement on (through? with?) the protean, hyper-articulated bodies of his Random Dance Company? How do the dancers visualize his cues? How do they respond to one another in the group dynamic? How do they remember? And how does he?
By the end of every day during those three weeks, each person in the theater had interviewed or been interviewed by others participating in a meticulously crafted experiment exploring the nature -- and role -- of cognition in creating dance.
Three years in the making, the experiment was initiated by Martin Wollesen, director of UCSD's ArtPower! presenting organization; carried forward by professor David Kirsh, director of the university's interactive cognition lab; and heartily supported by McGregor, Britain's leading contemporary choreographer.
“I feel like I'm in therapy 2 1/2 hours a day," the choreographer said before one early evening debriefing with Kirsh. “David's questions make you define terms, help you not to be woolly about the words you use. We're talking intimately about what I'm doing, about the body as a thinking body, about how it processes information and visualizes movement."
McGregor, also the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer and a much- sought-after opera director, created portions of his next piece, “Dyad 1909," while in San Diego with his company and support staff as ArtPower!'s first innovator-in-residence.
The residency kicked off with a performance by Random Dance of “Entity," a startling, virtuosic 2008 work, itself part of McGregor's ongoing inquiry into the relationship between the thinking mind and the moving body. The weeks of intensive investigation and creation were also part of a course taught by Kirsh, centered on creative and “distributed" -- meaning “group" -- cognition.
The investigation was designed to result, said Kirsh, “in a singular document of the process that will be available to others and analyzed for years to come."
Make a note of it
Like American dance innovator Merce Cunningham, McGregor has long been interested in what jump-starts his creative process. His company name, Random Dance, implies Cunningham's belief that random numbers can be as useful as logic, that chance and indeterminacy are core artistic tools.
