For two days, the Edinburgh Festival Theatre was the scene of Wayne McGregor’s latest work FAR, performed by his company Random. The abbreviated title stands for Flesh in the Age of Reason, a book written by Roy Porter. It is the history of explorations into body and soul starting in the 18th century.

Wayne McGregor draws on this theme and starts his performance in the Age of Enlightenment. The opening scene is accompanied by classical music and flaming torches and the first image we get from the duet is Purity. But then the light source changes into an animated white screen with flickering light and the music is no longer harmonic, but electronic. McGregor’s style is characterised by hyperextensions, twisted arms and bending knees. Waves seem to ebb through the dancers’ bodies, shrouded in transparent tops and tights.

The mystery of the self, embodied in flesh and blood, is the underlying structure of the dance. Wayne McGregor and Random set out to evoke the idea, pursued in Porter’s book, that the mind cannot exist without the body. Porter wrote that, “The body was the inseparable dancing partner of the mind or soul.” McGregor stated he is fascinated by cognitive science and how thinking has changed since the Age of Enlightenment. “Yet”, he says, “there is a lot we don’t know.” As a result, many aspects of the complex relationship between soma and psyche leave us in the dark, and the storyline of FAR at many points is also not clear. Accessible motions from the beginning somehow get lost in remoteness. The installation shows a countdown and produces the feeling of time pressure and the advent of a superior artificial intelligence.

Roy Porter in Flesh in the Age of Reason writes, “The outer and the inner - all merged, and all needed to be minutely observed if the human enigma were ever to be appreciated.” The outer appearance of McGregor’s dancers is clearly impressive and professional at every level. McGregor is known to be one of the few contemporary artists who also reach the mainstream audience. The dance moves and physical attractiveness  here certainly uphold this reputation. However, the revelation of the inner remains secret.

First published 11/10/11