Wayne McGregor/Random Dance

UK choreographer Wayne McGregor was back with his company Random Dance four years after DanceHouse first presented his Entity at the Playhouse. This weekend, to open their seventh season, DanceHouse presented FAR; the title is an acronym for Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason, a history of Enlightenment-era investigations into the connections between the mind and the body. Right up McGregor's alley, who has frequently collaborated with cognitive and neuro-scientists, and whose distinctive movement vocabulary is all about short circuiting the standard proprioceptive impulses sent between brain and body.

FAR is full of McGregor's trademark moves: arms and legs jerking and twitching; ribs jutting out from the torso; limbs extended at awkward angles or tilted away from the body's natural centre of gravity; lightning quick changes of direction. However, the piece begins and ends with two fairly traditional duets. In the first, a couple dances to Cecilia Bartoli's rending take on Giacomelli's aria "Sposa son disprezzata" (the same lament that plays in the episode of The Sopranos when Carmela is shown touring the Met after learning of Tony's infidelity). The dancers are surrounded by four torch bearers, and we might be forgiven for thinking we were being transported back to the late 17th century.

However, when following this prelude we start hearing Ben Frost's industrial music and the 3,200 LED lights on the giant circuit board that comprises the set's backdrop start pulsating, we know we are firmly in the here and now--or else some soon to unfold future of total sensory stimulation. In this world, bodies strut and pose and collide, fitting their bodies together in ways that at first seem strange and decidedly awkward, but that have the paradoxical effect of highlighting the dancers' incredible technique. Indeed, for all of McGregor's circumambulation in finding new pathways into a move, once there the dancers' lines remain gorgeous to behold.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the abundant partnering that provides the structural through-line to the piece. Dancers race aggressively toward each other, or else tear one another from existing group formations; but faced with the new idea of how to work together they set about solving the problem in endlessly inventive--and thoroughly supportive--variations. The closing duet is downright tender.

It was interesting watching Random Dance in FAR after having seen Ballet Preljocaj's Empty Moves. Although their styles and produced works couldn't be more different, both McGregor and Preljocaj are deconstructionist choreographers who understand that to take something apart (i.e. ballet) you first need to know how it works.

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Ballet Preljocaj's Empty moves

In early December 1977 John Cage took to the stage before a packed audience at the Teatro Lirico in Milan and began to read a random string of phonemes, enunciating a series of long and short, hard and soft sounds that at times approached but steadfastly refused to coalesce into any kind of intelligible words. Some thirty years later, French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has used a live recording of Cage's performance--complete with the increasingly restless and scandalized catcalls of the audience--as the score for his Empty Moves (parts I, II & III), in which he takes a similarly deconstructive approach to choreographic phrasing.

At the start of the piece, Preljocaj's four dancers--two men and two women--enter upstage left and mark their spots on the floor with a bit of tape. One of the women extends her leg and upper body into a horizontal plank; one of the men then grabs her outstretched arm and turns her, setting off a chain reaction of movement in the other dancers that flows more or less continuously over the next hour and forty-five minutes. Twice more during the course of the work the dancers will return to this spot and repeat the same opening sequence. However, the dance that follows in each of the three sections defies interpretive synthesis. Partnering combinations change; unison movement becomes faster and more percussive or slower and more flowing; extended floorwork is traded for jumps and hyper-verticality; the men drag the women around like rag dolls and then the women do the same to the men. The only constant is the materiality of the dancers' bodies and the endlessly inventive movement vocabulary Preljocaj deploys on and through them.

To this end, the virtuosity of the dancers--who are simply flawless--mirrors the virtuosity of the vocal music produced by Cage, who remains precise and unperturbed in his recitation despite the ever-mounting impatience and hostility of his audience. Except that what is enacted in Empty moves is anything but mimeticism. Which is also to say that the real revelation of Preljocaj's choreographic experiment in this work is that together the movements of his dancers' bodies and the grain of Cage's voice produce a reversal of figure and ground. For over the course of the piece it becomes more and more clear that to the extent the Teatro Lirico recording functions as a musical score, the dancers are reacting as much to the whistles and claps and verbal abuse of the Milanese as they are to maestro Cage. Then, too, our own restlessness watching 90+ minutes of rigorously abstract movement (exacerbated last night by a stiflingly hot and airless studio at The Dance Centre) necessarily becomes part of Preljocaj's choreographic score.

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