Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography (v95 and v96) is a work of sharp, stark, almost monochrome beauty that seems to carve shapes and thoughts in the air. It’s strongly structured yet built on elements of chance, classical yet contemporary, analytical yet full of mysterious feeling. It’s a pleasure to see it again, seven years after its premiere.
What you are seeing is never what you originally saw. McGregor is writing this story in front of our eyes and each incarnation is never precisely the same. It’s built of 23 numbered and named sections, representing the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human genome, and organised by a computer algorithm based on the choreographer’s DNA.
