Living Archive – A creative workshop with Studio Wayne McGregor

Circe – Experimental Platform for Dance and Theatre announces an open call to participate in the online workshops:

Living Archive – A creative workshop with Studio Wayne McGregor. Workshop participants will also have the chance to see Wayne McGregor’s performance.

About the workshops:

Living Archive – A creative workshop with Studio Wayne McGregor

This online creative programme is centred on award-winning British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s work Living Archive, which was created using an A.I choreographic tool developed in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture Lab.
Participants will have the opportunity to learn excerpts of Company Wayne McGregor’s repertoire and material derived from ten solos created as part of the development process for the A.I choreographic tool. They will also be able to use the A.I tool to develop their own material and gain insights into McGregor’s creative practice.
The programme will be delivered by a dancer from Company Wayne McGregor.

About the performance:

In collaboration with Google’s Arts and Culture Lab, Studio Wayne McGregor developed the Living Archive — an artificially intelligent choreographic tool, trained on hundreds of hours of video from choreographer Wayne McGregor’s extensive back catalogue, as well as solo material created on each of the current company.

From what it learned about the individual physical styles of an array of bodies dancing McGregor’s choreography, the system was able to respond to any new movement phrase by suggesting multiple original possibilities for the next phrase. Through swift real-time dialogue between wo/man and machine, the Living Archive unleashed the creative movement potential stored at molecular level within former works, amplifying the spectrum of possibility for choreographic decision-making and bringing dancers of the present into contact with traces of their predecessors.
A variation on the Creation theme that inspires Thomas Adès’ In Seven Days, the unique movement vocabulary and visual language for Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment was generated solely with this strange and elemental new body. Ben Cullen Williams’ design for the work manipulates abstract visualizations of the AI generated choreography into a suspended video installation which explores ideas of dance as code and vice versa.

Co-commissioned by The Music Center and Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Produced by Studio Wayne McGregor.

Company Wayne McGregor
Direction – Wayne McGregor
Choreography – Wayne McGregor, in collaboration with the dancers
AI choreography tool developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab
Music – Thomas Adès ‘In Seven Days’
Video Installation – Ben Cullen Williams
Lighting Consultant – Lucy Carter

Originally danced by Joshua Berwick, Jordan James Bridge, Rebecca Bassett-Graham, Camille Bracher, Izzac Carroll, Maria Daniela González, Chien-Shun Liao, Jacob O’Connell and Kyle White

About the company:

Studio Wayne McGregor is the creative engine for choreographer and director Wayne McGregor CBE, and the home of his life-long enquiry into thinking through and with the body. It is a nexus of partners who explore movement, artistry, thought and partnership. With Wayne at its centre, this collaborative network encompasses dancers, writers, composers, producers, software engineers, visual artists, scientists and more.

The project is supported by Tbilisi City Hall.