Who: Wayne McGregor | Random Dance
Work: ENTITY (60 minutes, no intermission)
Presented by: White Bird Uncaged
When: Thursday – Saturday, March 4  - 6, 8pm
Where: Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, Portland
Sponsor: Willamette Week
Tickets: Adults $26, Students $16 plus service fee.  Order online at www.whitebird.org or through Ticketmaster outlets, 1-800-745-3000 or www.ticketmaster.com.  
Visit www.whitebird.org/uncaged for the latest information.

Concluding its two-year Uncaged series, White Bird is delighted to welcome back Wayne McGregor | Random Dance March 4-6 at the Newmark Theatre.  Recently featured in Frederick Wiseman’s acclaimed documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet, La Danse, Wayne McGregor is a multi award-winning British choreographer, renowned for his physically testing choreography and ground-breaking collaborations across dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science.  A product of his own long, lean, supple physique and his ability to register movement with peculiar sharpness and speed, McGregor’s unique dance vocabulary is at one extreme a jangle of tiny fractured angles and, at the other, a whirl of seemingly boneless fluidity.  Resident Company at Sadler’s Wells in London and Associate Company at DanceEast in Suffolk, England, Wayne McGregor | Random Dance was founded in 1992 and became the instrument upon which McGregor has evolved his unique choreographic style.

In 2005, the White Bird/PSU Dance Series introduced Random Dance and Wayne McGregor’s lush futuristic shapes to Portland, and his stunningly rapid and articulate choreography will be seen in full force in his work ENTITY from 2008 that The Observer (UK) has called “state of the art… awe-inspiring.” Sold out in more than 15 countries and winner of the Southbank Show Award, ENTITY is an hour-long breathtaking trip through a soundscape created by Coldplay and Massive Attack collaborator, Jon Hopkins, and award-winning composer Joby Talbot.  A staggering blend of bodies, lights, technology and film that mark McGregor at the cutting edge of contemporary culture, ENTITY is the latest in a series of McGregor’s choreographic inquiries into the relationship between the brain and the moving body - a project which has led McGregor to work with psychologists, neuroscientists and software engineers.

McGregor is interested in the idea of 'an artificially intelligent choreographic entity' - a piece of software which can 'think' for itself and help generate movement. As with all of McGregor’s creations, the relationship between his research and the performance on stage is an abstract one. The highly complex choreography he has created for his 10 virtuosic dancers is characterized by arched spines, dislocated and off-center movement, that generates a sense of otherworldliness.  Luke Jennings (Time Magazine) has said of the fascinating work, “It’s the physical rush of the choreography that you take away from a McGregor performance — the mesh of high-speed detail, the interplay between the lyrical and the neurotic, the steely calligraphy of the limbs.

In addition to serving as Artistic Director of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, Wayne McGregor is Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet, the first modern dance maker to be given that post in the company’s history. In 2009, McGregor conceived, directed and choreographed the Baroque double bill of Acis and Galatea and Dido and Aeneas – a joint collaboration between the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera companies. In addition to creating new works for companies such as Paris Opera Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, New York City Ballet, Australian Ballet and English National Ballet, McGregor has directed opera for La Scala, Milan and choreographed movement for companies and projects as diverse as The National Theatre, English National Opera, Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire and the opening ceremony of the 2009 World Swimming Championships in Rome as well as site specific installations at the Hayward Gallery, Canary Wharf and the Pompidou Centre. 

Long fascinated with psychology and neuroscience, McGregor was appointed Artist-in-Residence at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge in 2003. Collaborating with a group of scientists, he conducted the background research into the relationship between dance and the mind from which AtaXia (2004) arose. The research and creation process behind Amu (2005) and Entity (2008) continue the company's association with interdisciplinary art and science collaborations, which is now consolidated under Random Dance’s R-Research department.

McGregor’s experiments have earned him a string of nominations and awards. These include an Arts Foundation Fellowship in 1998, Time Out Awards for Outstanding Achievement in 2001 and 2003, two Lawrence Olivier Awards for 2Human, 2004 and Chroma, 2007, a South Bank Show Award for Chroma.  In 2007 and 2008 he won The Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Best Modern Choreography for Amu, 2007 and Best Classical Choreography Chroma—the first choreographer ever to win in both categories.

Regularly supported by the British Council, Wayne McGregor | Random Dance has toured extensively including Europe, North America, Southeast & Central Asia, Russia, Israel, Columbia and Australia with frequent performances at some of the most prestigious world theatres such as Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam; Tel Aviv Opera; Lincoln Center, New York; and Dansens Hus, Stockholm.

The U.S. tour of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance’s ENTITY is funded in part by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Community Connections Fund of the MetLife Foundation.
White Bird Uncaged 2009-10 is made possible by generous grants from the Meyer Memorial Trust, the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the Collins Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.