Atomos EChOs and the Process-ing of Dances

Stephanie Jordan and Anna Pakes

In the spirit of today's autobiographical scholarship, this chapter on choreographic creative process is organized to reflect the creative processes of its authors. It begins, as Stephanie Jordan began, with a reflection upon Wayne McGregor's Atomos (2013), which in turn stemmed from a research project (EChO) funded by the AHRC and hosted by the research wing of McGregor's company Random Dance (now re-titled Company Wayne McGregor). EChO entailed studying the process of making Atomos, while situating this study within the context of an exhibition about McGregor's creative practices across his career. Jordan's original reflection 'Atomos EChOs (2013)' was published online in 2015. Haunted by the theoretical issues prompted by this writing (which appears here in revised form as Section 1), Jordan invited Anna Pakes to join her in further discussion of the philosophical and analytical implications of a widespread interest in choreographic process. Their collaborative writing forms Section 2 and 3 of this chapter. Section 2 surveys a broad range of creative process documentation that exists within dance, focusing upon twentieth-century, and particularly contemporary UK, practice, also highlighting today's discursive turn and the influence of digital technology upon the proliferation and nature of this documentation. Section 3 examines a set of questions about artistic intention, audience understanding and the nature of dances, drawing from analytic philosophy and from genetic criticism and sketch studies within musicology.

Section 1: Atomos (Stephanie Jordan)

Atomos was made for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, the company with which the choreographer has undertaken his most radical 'research'. A piece for McGregor's own company is an opportunity for more fundamental enquiry and reflection than most of his outside commissions offer. My memories of Atomos come from seeing two performances at Sadler's Wells Theatre. As the title suggests, this is a piece inspired by the concept and structure of the indivisible atom itself.

It is significant that the context in which I saw Atomos was different from that of most premieres that I attend. I was part of the team on the AHRC-funded project called EChO (acronym for Enhancing Choreographic Objects), which refers to the concept of a choreographic (digital) tool, or rather agent, that can be used in the making of choreography. The word 'Enhancing' recognizes McGregor's previous work with an autonomous, thinking, choreographic entity. Linked with the creation of Atomos, the new project was directed by WM|RD's Research Director Scott deLahunta and company anthropologist James Leach.

I had been invited specifically as an advisor to the core EChO team, because of my interest in links between dance and science, here, however, to draw from dance studies (alongside Sarah Whatley from Coventry University). Being an advisor meant that I knew about the history and development of a new digital agent and the plans to present it to the public within the Wellcome Collection exhibition 'Thinking with the Body', down the road at Euston and running in tandem with the Wells performances of Atomos. The exhibition was as much about the longer history of McGregor's fascination with science, since interdisciplinary discussions began back in 1999, a 'Software for Dancers' workshop in 2001, then initial explorations through artificial intelligence expanding into cognitive science in 2003, when McGregor became a research fellow in the University of Cambridge School of Experimental Psychology. The work ranged from analysis of thinking through the conventional tool of dancers' notebooks, to the evolution, from 2008, of the first digital tool, the Choreographic Language Agent (CLA, deLahunta 2009). It is crucial, however, that those behind both the old and new agent were not simply software programmers but digital artists in their own right, Marc Downie (OpenEndedGroup, USA) and Nick Rothwell (Cassiel, UK).

The new agent was called 'Becoming'. McGregor had pronounced: 'The CLA needs a body'. The original agent had been fed by text that he and the dancers had provided, and, as stimulus for dancing, it fed back to them as moving geometry on screens at the side of the dance studio. The dancers danced, went over to peer at the screen, danced again: they stopped and started and got cold. The CLA was lifeless. 'Becoming', on the other hand, emerged from a rectangular, human-size screen, so it bears some of the characteristics of an eleventh dancer in the studio. A skeleton of lines like bones intersecting with joints appears out of nowhere, and appended to it are what look like light webs, hairs, as well as arrows and geometrical structures. Wearing 3-D glasses, you notice how it can rotate and trace luscious arcs. Thus, it elicits a kinaesthetic response, as if alive. This is one in a series of 'moves', each followed by blackout, during which the 'creature' prepares for the next move. Sometimes a joint that has 'grown' a cluster of bones presses directly towards you, dispassionately. The effect is calm, sometimes sinister, sometimes juicy, cooler if the colour is blue, more dangerous if it is red or shot through with yellow. McGregor thought it beautiful....

There was a big secret behind this creature, namely its origins within the...