Genetic code, AI and choreography merge in a work that re-imagines and remakes itself anew for every performance.

Throughout his career, Wayne McGregor has made choreography that interrogates life through the experience of the body in its multifaceted relationship with technology. In 2017, McGregor turned his attention to the ‘body as archive’ with Autobiography (1.0), the first in a developing series of unique dance portraits inspired and determined by the sequencing of his own genetic code.

Layering choreographic imprints over personal memoir and in dialogue with a specially created algorithm that hijacks McGregor’s DNA data, Autobiography upends the traditional nature of dance-making as artificial intelligence and instinct converge in creative authorship.

In the latest iterations of the work, AISOMA – a new AI tool developed with Google Arts and Culture utilizing machine-learning trained on 100s of hours of McGregor’s choreographic archive – overwrites the configurations of its initial state to present fresh movement options to the performers, injecting unfamiliar and often startling content into the choreographic ecosystem. Life, writing itself anew.

Now the 95th and 96th iterations of Autobiography come to Sadler’s Wells in a captivating evening that is never quite the same as before.

Autobiography: Co-produced by Sadler’s Wells, London, UK; Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg; Edinburgh 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.

Kindly supported by Brenda Leff

Header image © Andrej Uspenski