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Atomos. Choreographic work for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance. Atomos was co-produced by Sadler’s Wells, London; Peak Performances @ Montclair State University, New Jersey, USA; Movimentos Festwochen der Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany; and Festival Montpellier Danse 2014. Co-commissioned by Fondazione I Teatri, Reggio Emilia, Italy, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire, with support from the Idlewild Trust. Premiered 9th-12th October, 2013 at Sadler's Wells, London. Currently Touring. DVD of performance and Programme Documentation.

I have worked for several years with collaborators to build an interactive digital object to support dance making, resulting in prototypes that have changed the pattern of my studio practice. The latest version, Becoming, has been conceived as an additional ‘11th’ dancer, designed to work in three dimensions. The presence of this artificially intelligent, life sized and digitally rendered ‘body’ presents new challenges. In Atomos, I was interested in 'growing' material from and towards stimuli - in this case atomised moments from the film Blade Runner. These miniature dances would be discrete entities, with their own logic, syntax, and design. I was fascinated by the potential of the 11th dancer to illicit kinaesthetic responses from the company: it smartly and organically mines data, dividing the whole film into 1200 'atoms' and analysing the colour and kinetic of camera motion, human action and gesture to drive the creation of an alternative abstract body, a collision of limbs and sinew that works out a physical problem in real time and throws its potentials on screen. The dancers are set choreographic tasks in order create with Becoming, which learns from past experience and utilises this knowledge in the present. The 11th dancer is never seen, but remains a conceptual and invisible driver of the material. Separate atoms were created, each with a specific literacy. Prime numbers feature as organising principles: the number of dancers; the interrelation of atoms; mechanisms of counting. The notion of formal iteration features in the pattern and distribution of the work over time, and unusually for me, the content and form remains uncuttable, indivisible and not re-purposed. The work is in three parts: a pure origami for the body in a volumetric space; a central section collaging imagery, bodies and sound in competing forces; a final section that pixellates the stage and anatomises the body with complex co-ordination and asymmetries, tricking the eye. See URL and programme note for additional context, collaborators and images.

http://www.randomdance.org/productions/wayne_mcgregor_current/atomos