“Everything you can imagine is real.” —Pablo Picasso Curlycues & Ink Blots by Austin Buchholtz The welcome dinner for Wayne McGregor Random Dance is held at Huber's, Portland oldest restaurant, hosted by longtime White Board members Richard Didzun and Bette Sinclair and everyone is in a jovial mood. Wayne McGregor could not tour with his company, since he is high demand these days, and I sit with a few of the dancers. Paolo Mangiola was dancing under contract for a German company when he saw McGregor's work and felt so compelled to dance with Random, based in London, that he made it happen. Paolo says that Wayne is not only a great choreographer, he's inspirational, and highly supportive of the artistic development of his company members. Paolo is choreographing a solo work about how people choose their leaders (from Bush to Berlusconi), a work he will perform in a competition at the Space in London. After Wayne saw his preliminary idea, he told him not only that it was good but that Paolo would win. I ask Paolo what it's like to dance a work by McGregor: physically and mentally demanding, exhausting on every level. On vacation back home in Italy, he tries to forget about dance, eat whatever he wants, and parties with friends. But when he returns to work, it takes a full month of long, sweaty days to regain his finely tuned athleticism which McGregor's work requires. Agnès López Río agrees. Although she's a vegetarian, tonight she's ordering the stuffed salmon because she simply needs a megadose of protein for tomorrow night's 60-minute performance. Agnès is the only company member from Spain and she says she'd never date another dancer. Instead, her boyfriend is a sculptor who lives in Holland, but they visit each other often and he gets along famously with her mother, although Agnès acts as their translator. She is proud how far her country has developed culturally since the dictatorship of Franco into the 80's, including the legalization of gay marriage—a policy more progressive than many other European countries. Before we finish dinner, Huber's famous Spanish Coffee pouring/fire show is quite a spectacle. Agnès doesn't seem impressed: "that's not Spanish." (I order some and enjoy it anyway. I can't help it: branding adds flavor to my American taste buds.) Daniela Neugebauer, from Switzerland, is the newest member of the company (having started in January) and is enjoying being on tour, getting little glimpses of the US. She finds Portland comforting, almost European. I'm happy to hear that, since I'd like to live in Europe too, but now I don't have to make the effort. And instead of booking flights and faraway hotels for even a short jaunt, attending the White Bird series allows me to schlep locally for lovely, corporeal glimpses of the real Europe. On Friday night, I take my seat to watch my new friends in Wayne McGregor's Entity. Three large, horizontal screens create a semi-circular space facing the audience. On one, we see a looped animation of the = running dog from early stop motion photography. Knowing of McGregor's professional exploration of how the psyche meets the body and where psychology meets choreography, I think of the Pavlovian stimulus response studies with dogs. So I ask: how does my viewing a body in motion affect me, the viewer? How much can an audience member share the experience of the dancer? Surely I must somehow feel what I see happening. Why else would we buy tickets and sit with rapt attention? So for the next hour, I attempt to adopt McGregor's scientific method. Time to test my own psychosomatic circuits. The dancers are presented as unisexual, wearing white tanks (with what look like DNA prints) and black trunks. They each start in solos, lucid with berserk lines and walk off with rolling steps, only to soon re-enter. Limbs become jagged and abstract. One man holds another like a baby painted by cubist Picasso. Small ornaments—sticky steps, finger curls, a back bend with her head almost to the floor—punctuate rigorous sequences. There is no story. I didn't expect or want one. But I begin to notice how dancers share or send energy: pushing another without touching, a glance from one igniting another's torso, two individuals entangling briefly becoming a four-legged being, one lifts another and turns her this way and that as if he is inspecting a doll, one dancer's head falling back gently into the seated lap of another, a single leg vibrating. When my focus widens to encompass the whole stage, the negative space around the dancers' bodies appears activated. Hunchbacks, flowers, spindles, darts—their shadows, reflections, and afterglow. Either I'm putting myself through a newfangled Rorschach test, or I am happily punch-drunk, knitting in a Notre Dame flower shop watching the world go by. In the sobering air of the Q&A with company members afterward, we find out from rehearsal director Odette Hughes that the name of the company is, and means, Random. While it seems like the dancers are improvising, only seven minutes out of sixty have improvisation and even then the dancers have a choice between a handful of set patterns. Dancers who are attracted to work with McGregor come from a rigorous classical background but are curious, want to be challenged and be part of the creative process. Indeed, I notice in the program that McGregor allows credits for the choreography for Entity to read: "McGregor in collaboration with the dancers." He obviously is comfortable sharing recognition, which shows a refreshing sense of humility. I ask Agnès how she'd describe to her mother the work they are performing in Portland. She takes the mic and explains: "Loads of information, quite physical. I think about physical emotion, like the running dog that never stops. I finish quite drained. It pushes physical boundaries, and mental. She saw it. She liked it!" And what measurable impressions did it make on me? Aside from my desire to jump up on stage and join in, McGregor's intriguing use of energy sent between dancers and tendency to fill the dance space with beautiful shapes satisfied an artistic tendency of my own. When I have a ball-point pen in my hand and an envelop or scrap of paper, without thinking I fill it with mysterious curlycues, faces, and sometimes mazes. In art history this tendency is called horror vacui, which according to Wikipedia, is "the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with detail....Many examples of horror vacui in art come from, or are influenced by, the mentally unstable and inmates of psychiatric hospitals." Thanks Wikipedia. When next I get a chance, I'll ask Wayne McGregor to sit down, relax, and I'll tell him what I think about my mother. *** Austin Buchholtz is a graphic designer, writer, and certified instructor of Ballroom and Latin dance. Austin was White Bird's Director of Audience Services from August 2001 to December 2003.