Living Archive: Creating Choreography with Artificial Intelligence

Deeply invested in technological advancement and scientific research into creativity and choreographic thinking throughout his stellar career, McGregor has long been fascinated by artificial intelligence as a potential dance-making tool.

McGregor initially approached The Lab seeking an innovative way to harness his vast video archive, to place it in dialogue with his present-day practice in a bid to generate something wholly new, ahead of the 25th anniversary of his pioneering dance company. At the forefront of his mind, were the questions: What is choreography? Who has to make choreography? What are the potentials of choreography?    

As Google’s mission is to organise information, rendering it understandable and useful, Wayne McGregor’s video archive, which would take a human being a fortnight to watch, was an attractive proposition as a highly specific data set. But what really excited Henry about collaborating with the choreographer was his affinity for technology and tireless pursuit of progress.      

McGregor was duly impressed with the results. “In a way, it’s like a massive atlas that allows you to zone in on any one physical movement, or to move through movements across bodies, to make the representation of a body do something that’s never been done before,” he shares. “It’s a brilliant way of organising physical intelligence that you then use to develop new physical ideas.”  

The generation of movement possibilities as a responsive source of inspiration for human creators was always the goal of the Living Archive project – rather than the crafting of technology to replace any single soul. “What's interesting is that what we've given to Wayne is just one tool in the creation process,” says Henry. “It offers him and his dancers multiple options, but there is always a human in the loop, because there isn’t an algorithm that can judge the quality of the choreography.”      

What this tool does is make the canvas way, way bigger for each little moment … It allows us to go: I’m starting with this phrase; I’d like the AI to invent the next, but in the style of Jordan, or in the style of Jess. And you can get combinations of those, and then it’s [constantly] learning and feeding back, so this iterative version gives you all these possibilities that you couldn’t have imagined.” 

These AI-derived movement are rendered on screen via both stick figures and (intentionally) partially-abstracted, human forms – any one of which might momentarily act as a supplementary ‘eleventh dancer’. 

Rather than copying the AI-derived movements, McGregor and the Company’ dancers translate inspiring elements of these suggested motions through their own thinking bodies: real-time, human-machine interaction.    

The presentation of every individual video sequence sits along a spectrum, from inescapably digital, abstract imagery to a composite figure that closely represents a human. “When I sat down with Henry’s team, I said, ‘Well if a computer could dance, what would the computer want to look like?’” says Cullen Williams. “It's actually the computer code that's dancing, and then we’re slowly moving up through a spectrum of code [until, eventually] it resembles the outline of a dancer.”  

Cullen Williams then manipulated these videos using a suite of Google software, before adjusting them to Adès’ music. After which, he edited his materials in tandem with McGregor, his dancers and the choreographic tool making Living Archive: An AI Experiment in the studio. “There's a synergy in everything being created within the same week,” says the artist. “It's a testing lab of ideas … so rather than being a perfect [whole], there'll be moments when things synch up and points where everything diverges.”