company wayne mcgregor - sfperformances.org · opening sequence, paloma faith’s brit awards...

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presents…

COMPANY WAYNE McGREGOR

Autobiography

Thursday–Saturday March 8–10, 2018 | 7:30pmYBCA Theater

Concept, Direction and ChoreographyWayne McGregor

Choreography in collaboration with the DancersRebecca Bassett-Graham Jacob O’ConnellJordan James Bridge James PettTravis Clausen-Knight Fukiko TakaseLouis McMiller Po-Lin TungDaniela Neugebauer Jessica Wright

MusicJlin

Set Design and ProjectionBen Cullen Williams

Lighting DesignLucy Carter

Costume DesignAitor Throup

DramaturgyUzma Hameed

For Tickets and More: sfperformances.org | 415.392.2545 | 3

Rehearsal Director Technical DirectorOdette Hughes Christopher Charles

Technical Manager Production Electrician/RelighterColin Everitt Ashley Bolitho

Lighting Programmer Sound RealisationJenny Kershaw Nick Sagar

Software AnimatorNick Rothwell Tom Scott

Set Built by Photography and FilmJoseph Waller Fabrications Ben Cullen Williams

Ongoing Scientific PartnersWellcome Trust Sanger InstituteEMBL—European Bioinformatics InstituteConnecting Science—Wellcome Genome Campus Public EngagementWellcome Genome Campus Society and Ethics ResearchUniversity Medical Centre Utrecht

Co-produced by Studio Wayne McGregor; Sadler’s Wells, London, UK; Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg; Edin-burgh International Festival, UK; Festspielhaus St Pölten, Austria; Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Movimentos Festwochen der Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany.

Co-commissioned by West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong; Festival Diaghilev. P.S., St Petersburg, Russia; Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Guimarães, Portugal; Seattle Theatre Group, USA (music); Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, UK.

Music by Jlin in partnership with Unsound.

With thanks to A.T. Studio.

This presentation is made possible in part by the generous support of James C. Hormel and Michael P. Nguyen.


What does it mean to write your own life-story?

For twenty-five years, Wayne McGregor has been making choreography that interrogates life through the experience of the body, moving intelligently in space and time. His practice has been far-reaching and sought out collaborators from a diverse range of artistic and scientific fields to investigate the nature of embodied cognition.

Now McGregor turns his attention to the body as archive, as he embarks on a cycle of choreographic portraits illuminated by the sequencing of his own genome. The first of these studies, Autobiography, is an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life, writing, refracting both remembered pasts and speculative futures.

Palimpsesting McGregor’s choreographic imprint over personal memoir and genetic code in a continuous re-imagining, Autobiography unfolds uniquely for each and every performance. Life, writing itself anew.


ARTIST PROFILES

San Francisco Performances presents Company Wayne McGregor for the fourth time. The Com-pany made its SF Performances debut in 2011.

Wayne McGregor CBE Choreographer

Born in 1970, Wayne McGregor is a multi-award winning British choreographer and director, internationally renowned for trailblazing innovations in performance that have radically redefined dance in the modern era. Driven by an insatiable curios-ity about movement and its creative poten-tials, his experiments have led him into col-laborative dialogue with an array of artistic forms, scientific disciplines, and technolog-ical interventions. The startling and multi-dimensional works resulting from these interactions have ensured McGregor’s po-sition at the cutting edge of contemporary arts for over two decades.

Studio Wayne McGregor is the creative engine of McGregor’s life-long choreo-graphic enquiry into thinking through and with the body. It encompasses his own touring company of dancers, Company Wayne McGregor; creative collaborations across dance, film, music, visual art, tech-nology and science; and highly specialized Learning and Engagement and Research programs. Studio Wayne McGregor has opened its own newly created studio space at Here East in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a shared space for making where the creative brains of the day can exchange knowledge and invent together.

Company Wayne McGregor is Mc-Gregor’s ensemble of highly skilled danc-ers. Founded in 1992, this was the origi-nal instrument through which McGregor evolved his distinctive visual style, reveal-ing the movement possibilities of the body in ever more precise degrees of articula-tion. McGregor has made over thirty works for the company and today it continues to be his laboratory for ambitious and ex-perimental new choreography, touring his work across the UK and around the world. Company Wayne McGregor is Resident Company at Sadler’s Wells, London.

McGregor is also Resident Choreogra-pher at The Royal Ballet, where his produc-tions are acclaimed for their daring recon-figuring of classical language. He is also regularly commissioned by and has works in the repertories of the most important ballet companies in the world, including Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet and San Francisco Ballet. He is in demand as a cho-reographer for theatre, opera, film (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Legend of Tarzan, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them and Sing), music videos (Radiohead, Thom Yorke, The Chemical Brothers), fash-ion shows (Gareth Pugh at New York Fash-ion Week 2014), campaigns (everyBODY for Selfridges) and TV (The 2016 Brit Awards Opening Sequence, Paloma Faith’s Brit Awards performance 2015). Some of the long list of artists who have partnered with McGregor through more than twenty years of collaborative multi-disciplinary work include John Tavener, Audrey Niffenegger, Jamie xx, Max Richter, Olafur Eliasson, Ben Frost, Thom Yorke, Mark Wallinger, Random International, Jon Hopkins, John Pawson and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Wayne McGregor is Professor of Chore-ography at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, has an Honorary Doctor of Science from Plymouth University and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from University of Leeds, and is part of the Circle of Cultural Fellows at King’s College London. In 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the British Science Association. He is serving on the jury for the RIBA International Prize 2018. McGregor’s work has earned him a multitude of awards including four Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards, two Time Out Awards, two South Bank Show Awards, three Olivier Awards, a prix Benois de la Danse and two Golden Mask Awards. In 2011 McGregor was awarded a CBE for Services to Dance.

Most recently McGregor premiered +/- Human, an immersive art installation

and dance performance for the Round-house; Multiverse, Obsidian Tear and Woolf Works for The Royal Ballet; Tree of Codes for Company Wayne McGregor; Alea Sands for The Paris Opera Ballet; Kairos for Zu-rich Ballet; and presented Thinking with the Body at Wellcome Collection, an exhibition exploring his collaborative enquiry into choreographic thinking.

Jlin Music

Electronic musician Jlin, a former steel mill worker from Gary, Indiana, is cred-ited with bringing a unique sound to the Chicago-born footwork genre. She began producing music in 2008, and her track Erotic Heat featured on the 2011 Planet Mu compilation Bangs and Works Vol. 2. The song was later used to accompany a 2014 Rick Owens fashion show, and her debut album, Dark Energy, was released in 2015 to critical acclaim. Dark Energy displayed a unique creative talent that outgrew any easy genre tags, placing her in her own musical zone of hyper rhythmic cuts that displayed a tension between anger and col-orful euphoria. Embarking on a world tour soon after the album release Jlin grew a reputation as a formidable live act, and the album ended up in the top 10’s and 20’s of album lists for 2015 for lots of music pub-lications. Her long-awaited second album, Black Origami, was released in May 2017, praised by Pitchfork as “an overwhelm-ing piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go.” She won the “Best Diffi-cult Second Album” award at the AIM Mu-sic Awards 2017.

Ben Cullen Williams Set Design and Projection

Ben Cullen Williams is a London based visual artist and designer. His work ex-plores the boundaries between art and architecture and his distinctive aesthetic, which focuses and experiments with the sensory experience of light, space and form, informs the range of his work. He questions digital and physical fabrication processes to understand our evolving re-lationship to matter. He works in a range of mediums, from sculpture, installation, photography to film, crossing boundar-ies between disciplines. In 2016, he was invited by the polar explorer Robert Swan to Antarctica where he created his photo-graphic series, Fragile Strength. Also that


year Calvin Klein commissioned a collabo-ration of his Sliced Vessel sculpture series to be produced and installed in Hong Kong. His commercial clients include Y- 3, the British Fashion Council and Mackintosh. On these projects he utilizes his range of media to create affective sculptures, instal-lations, spaces and images. Ben’s work has been shown internationally, most recently at the Beaux Arts Museum, Nantes. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and at the Royal College of Art, respectively.

Lucy Carter Lighting Design

Lucy Carter is the winner of the Knight of Illumination Award for Dance in 2008 for Chroma and 2015 for Woolf Works (The Royal Ballet). She is a close creative col-laborator of Wayne McGregor; they have worked together for many years across a multitude of works for both Company Wayne McGregor and The Royal Ballet, where McGregor serves as Resident Cho-reographer. Her credits for work with McGregor include +/- Human (Company Wayne McGregor & The Royal Ballet); Tree of Codes (Manchester International Festival, Company Wayne McGregor & Paris Opera Ballet); Atomos, UNDANCE, FAR, Dyad 1909, Entity, Amu, AtaXia, Nem-esis, Digit01 (Company Wayne McGregor); Multiverse, Obsidian Tear, Woolf Works, Tetractys: The Art of the Fugue, Raven Girl, Machina, Carbon Life, Live Fire Exercise, Li-men, Infra, Chroma, Qualia, Nimbus (Royal Ballet, London); Borderlands (San Fran-cisco Ballet); Dido and Aeneas and Acis and Galatea (Royal Opera/Royal Ballet, London); Outlier (New York City Ballet); Dyad 1929 (Australian Ballet); Kirikou and Karaba (musical); Alea Sands, L’Anatomie de la Sensation, Genus (Paris Opera Ballet); Skindex and Renature (Nederlands Dans Theater 1); 2Human (English National Bal-let); Yantra and Nautilus (Stuttgart Ballet). Lucy’s work extends to Theatre and Op-era including: The End of Longing (Play-house Theatre); Medea, Blurred Lines and Emil and the Detectives (National Theatre); Husbands and Sons (National Theatre and Royal Exchange Manchester); La finta giardiniera (Glyndebourne) and Lohengrin (Welsh National Opera and Polish Na-tional Opera). Other credits include: No Body (Installation at Sadler’s Wells), FLUX (Schlossmediale Werdernberg) and the lighting design for Paloma Faith’s perfor-mance at the Brit Awards 2015 (choreo-graphed by McGregor).

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Aitor Throup Costume Design

Aitor Throup is an Argentinian-born British designer, artist and creative di-rector. Throup is renowned for his work exploring the human anatomy through rich conceptual narratives. His multi-disciplinary design house A.T. Studio col-laborates across multiple industries and develops the conceptual clothing brand New Object Research. Throup’s debut run-way show in 2016 for New Object Research received critical acclaim for breaking the boundaries of the standard catwalk format featuring life-size articulated puppets in-stead of models.

Both the studio and the brand are com-mitted to imagining and creating new ways of storytelling through object design and the production of related materials. Throup is currently Executive Creative Di-rector at G-Star RAW.

Uzma Hameed Dramaturgy

Writer and director Uzma Hameed has previously collaborated with Wayne Mc-Gregor as dramaturg on Woolf Works, Ob-sidian Tear and Multiverse, all for The Royal Ballet. Autobiography is her first collabora-tion with Company Wayne McGregor. Ha-meed graduated from the University of Cambridge with a first in modern and me-dieval languages, and trained in classical Indian dance. In 1997 she founded the Big Picture Company, an innovative theatre company combining new writing with choreography and film. Hameed’s credits with the Big Picture Company included writing and directing A Dark River, Taj and Prophetess, all of which toured extensively around the UK. Hameed was also associate director at Derby Playhouse where her di-recting credits included Shirley Valentine, Dracula, Frankenstein, and her own contro-versial adaptation of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which drew parallels between the threat to Elizabethan England from Catholic Rome, and Islamist terrorism today. Hameed has written reviews and features for Dance The-atre Journal, Dance Now, East, Animated and The Big Issue. Her first novel, The Kinship of Djinns (co-written with her sister Ambreen Hameed) is currently out on submission.

COMPANY WAYNE MCGREGOR

Odette Hughes Associate Director

Odette joined Company Wayne McGregor in June 1997, becoming the company’s Re-hearsal Director in 2000. Odette is now re-sponsible for the company’s everyday artis-tic supervision, overseeing performances and directing rehearsals. Odette was First Assistant Choreographer to McGregor on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2004). She worked as Rehearsal Director on Michel Ocelot’s musical Kirikou et Karaba which McGregor directed, and on The Royal Bal-let’s Engram and English National Opera’s Salome, both choreographed by McGregor. She assisted McGregor on his production of Dido and Aeneas at La Scala, Milan, and has restaged numerous McGregor Ballets in-cluding Eden|Eden for San Francisco Ballet (2006); Genus for Paris Opera Ballet (2009); Dyad 1929 for The Australian Ballet (2013); and the multi award-winning Chroma for the National Ballet of Canada (2010) and Bolshoi Ballet (2011). She has also restaged McGregor’s contemporary pieces for vari-ous education establishments. In addition, Odette has taught numerous workshops and masterclasses both nationally and in-ternationally, and has extensive experience in community and outreach work for all age and abilities, including commissioned work with the Centre for Advanced Training at the Lowry, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance, and the Northern School of Contemporary Dance; and with the students at École de Danse de Genève. Odette was ap-pointed Associate Director in 2007.

Jordan James Bridge

Born in Manchester, Jordan started dancing at the age of 14. He went on to train at London Contemporary Dance School where he worked with Kerry Nich-olls, Richard Alston and Tony Adigun. Af-ter graduating, Jordan joined Alexander Whitley Dance Company performing The Measures Taken and The Grit In The Oyster nationally and internationally. Jordan has also toured with Tavaziva Dance Company in 2015/16 and 2017 in the evocative work Africarmen. In 2016 he joined Michael Clark Company, performing a featured role in LAND during the critically acclaimed To a Simple, Rock and Roll… Song, which toured nationally and internationally. Jordan has been commissioned to create his own work at various institutions and he is currently Resident Choreographer for Berkshire County Dance Company Youth, which was awarded “Best Performance” at the 2016 U.Dance Awards from Youth Dance Eng-land. He has also taught extensively in the UK. Jordan joined Company Wayne Mc-Gregor in 2017.



Rebecca Bassett-Graham

Born in Ontario, Canada, Rebecca trained at the New Zealand School of Dance, graduating in 2011. She interned with New Zealand Dance Company dur-ing their 2012 Rotunda development proj-ect, and with DanceNorth during director Raewyn Hill’s work Bolera. She performed in DanceNorth’s Townsville Queensland season and through the Australian Ballet’s Melbourne season. Rebecca moved to Lon-don in 2013 where she worked with Lewis Major, performing at Sadler’s Wells and the TEDx conference in London. She per-formed her own works When All is Said and Done at the Australian & New Zealand Fes-tival of Literature and Arts in London, and It’s Complicated and the assessor, the latter co-choreographed by Jono Selvadurai, at the C12 Dance Theatre Emerge Festival in 2015. She has worked closely with Beyond Repair Dance Company and has partici-pated in research and development for The Light Surgeons. Rebecca joined Company Wayne McGregor in 2017.

Travis Clausen-Knight

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Tra-vis moved to England and later graduated from the Arts Educational School, Tring Park in 2009. While in training, he won several awards for dance and choreogra-phy within the school and outside, includ-ing at the National Youth Ballet and the International Competition of Dance in Spoleto, Italy. Since graduating, Travis per-formed with Matthew Bourne’s world tour of Swan Lake and is featured in the 3D film of the production. He was involved in Mi-chael Clark’s TH residency at Tate Modern in 2011. He also performed with Tavaziva Dance in their re-mount of Double Take and was part of the creation of Sensual Africa. His other credits include work with A.D. Dance and Combination Dance. Since join-ing Company Wayne McGregor in 2013, Travis has also pursued creative work in fashion, featuring in several collections for upcoming brands such as Kawakey and Jamie Elwood as well as in campaigns for Cerruti 1881. His passion for choreography and creation also drives his successful col-laborations with other artists as well as his commitments to mentoring and teaching young creatives.

Louis McMiller

Louis was born in the UK in 1990 and started dancing at the age of seven. He graduated from The Royal Ballet School in 2010 with a Professional Diploma in Dance. He danced in the Annual Performances at The Royal Opera House; then, in his gradu-ate year, he toured Japan and performed in many productions with The Royal Ballet. He is a model with First Model Manage-ment and has been featured in Charlotte Tilbury, NOWNESS, “What Lies Beneath” by Rick Guest and the album artwork for FKA Twigs. His work also includes cam-paigns for Patrik Ervell, Westfield Shop-ping Centre and Uniqlo. Louis joined Com-pany Wayne McGregor in 2010.



Daniela Neugebauer

Born in Switzerland, Daniela started her professional dance training with Cathy Sharp in Basel after which she joined the Ballet School of John Neumeier in Ham-burg and Codarts Rotterdam, Univer-sity of the Arts. She received the Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund scholarship from 2000–2003. Daniela danced for Ballet Gulbenkian under direction of Paulo Ri-beiro and Dance Works Rotterdam under Ton Simons. She also worked with Paul Selvyn Norton, Itzik Galili, Dana Casper-son, Bruno Listopad, Sjoerd Vreugdenhil, Vaclav Kunes, Rob Binet and Renaud Wi-eser. Daniela joined Company Wayne Mc-Gregor in 2010.

Jacob O’Connell

Born in Swindon, of Irish and Jamaican descent, Jacob studied at Swindon Dance for five years while performing with Swin-don Youth Dance Company. In 2015, Jacob was awarded the BBC Young Dancer title in the contemporary category, where he performed solos by Amanda Britton and Alexander Whitley at Sadler’s Wells, broad-cast on BBC2. During and after studying at Rambert School of Ballet and Contempo-rary Dance, Jacob performed with Rambert Company in Tomorrow and Other Works, and toured with Ross McKim’s Moving Vi-sion Company, and internationally with INALA, choreographed by Mark Baldwin. He has also created and collaborated on cho-reographic works at Sadler’s Wells, Mr Won-derful, and at Cloud Dance Festival. Jacob joined Company Wayne McGregor in 2017.

James Pett

James Pett competed as a gymnast for ten years, representing Great Britain at the World Gymnastrada in Austria in 2007. He trained at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, graduating in 2011 with a first class BA (Hons) degree, and was awarded The Marion North Award for outstanding achievement in performance. In 2010 he worked with Patricia Lent on a revival of Merce Cunningham’s Scramble, dancing the original Cunningham solo. In 2011 he worked with Kerry Nicholls on a collaborative piece with Meridian Brass, Ave Maris Stella. The work was performed at the Royal Festival Hall celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Festival of Britain. From 2011–13, James danced for Richard Alston Dance Company. As well as touring internationally with the company, he has performed in Dance Umbrella 2011, working with Robert Cohan on a revival of In Memory and, in 2012, The Bride and the Bachelors exhibition at the Barbican Cen-tre, working with Jeannie Steele on a col-lective of Cunningham’s works.

The performance of the duet James danced in Richard Alston’s Unfinished Busi-ness was the New York Times critics’ top dance pick for 2013. James is a model for W Model Management and is a creative am-bassador for his home town of Eden Court in Scotland. He also works in southern It-aly teaching and choreographing his own work. James joined Company Wayne Mc-Gregor in 2013.



Fukiko Takase

Fukiko was born in New York and raised in Japan by her mother Takako Takase, her-self a respected dancer. She was a recipient of a three-year Cultural Affairs Fellowship from the Japanese government to study at the Codarts Rotterdam Dance Academy and London Contemporary Dance School, from where she gained a Certificate in Con-temporary Dance in 2006. She completed the Postgraduate Diploma Program in Con-temporary Dance the following year. From 2006 to 2010, Fukiko worked for Henri Oguike Dance Company, assisting Henri with Tread Softly, a commission for Ram-bert Dance Company, and Da Gamba, for Ballet Black. In 2013 she danced with Thom Yorke in the Atoms for Peace music video Ingenue, choreographed by McGregor, and she was featured in an AnOther magazine dance film, and the winter campaign for UNIQLO 2015. In Japan, Fukiko has worked as a freelance dancer and choreographed Landing, a full-length work for Theatre X Cai, and Autumn Hunch for the National Theatre, Tokyo. Her choreographic work Cultivate a Quiet Joy was selected for Draft Works at the Royal Opera House in 2015. She collaborated with Goshka Macuga, Mira Calix and Mbulelo Ndabeni on End of the Line, as part of Frieze Art Fair, which premiered at the David Robert Art Foun-dation in 2016. In 2017 she choreographed music videos for Daniel Brandt (Nowness), and Forevermore by Hikaru Utada. Fukiko joined Company Wayne McGregor in 2011.

Po-Lin Tung

Born in Yilan, Taiwan, Po-Lin is Atayal, one of the Taiwanese aboriginal tribes. From 2009–2013, Po-Lin studied dance performance at the Taipei National Uni-versity of the Arts. He toured Taiwan and the United States in 2012 as a member of Fang Yi Sheu and Artists for a year while studying in the school. In 2013, he worked with the Gelsey Kirkland Ballet in New York City for one season, followed by the Mexican company Tania Pérez-Salas Com-pañía de Danza in Mexico City, and the United States from 2014–2015. In 2015, Po-Lin worked as a freelance dancer in New York City with a number of companies, while training with Zvi Gotheiner and Jon Ole Olstad. Po-Lin joined Company Wayne McGregor in 2016.

Jessica Wright

Jessica trained at Central School of Bal-let, London, before joining D.A.N.C.E., an interdisciplinary program based in Brussels, Aix-en-Provence and Dresden. During this time she performed with the Forsythe Company in Human Writes and danced in new works by McGregor, Prel-jocaj and Flamand. She has restaged ex-cerpts of Company Wayne McGregor works Entity and FAR for Milano City Ballet and Compagnie Grenade (Aix-en-Provence). Jessica also makes dance films in collabo-ration with choreographer Morgann Run-acre-Temple, commissioned by Channel 4, Big Dance and English National Ballet (in partnership with TATE Liverpool and Manchester International Festival). Their films have screened at international festi-vals including FIFA (Montreal), Cinedans (Netherlands), Agite y Sirva (Mexico), and ScreenDance (Sweden). The Try Out was nominated for two awards at IMZ’s presti-gious DanceScreen Festival (2016). Curing Albrecht (2017) was commissioned by ENB as a curtain raiser to Akram Khan’s Giselle and was subsequently shown on BBC iPlay-er, Canal+ TV (France) and at the ICA. It was awarded “Best Dance Film” at the New Renaissance Film Festival (UK) and “Best Director” at Portland Dance Film Festi-val (USA) in 2017. Jessica joined company Wayne McGregor in 2008.

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