Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

With We Humans – his project, his novel – Wayne McGregor reminds us that dance is the human substance whole, made of breath and blood. A millennia-long afflatus runs through it, reaching its aim only when the living perform among the living, in the unfathomable here and now: the primordial sense of stagecraft – bound on the scene to time, space and action – that is transience.

This is a human that is profoundly human, assisted by recordings and documentation; traces that La Biennale di Venezia collects and treasures thanks to the careful and indispensable work carried out by its Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), a repository of memory at the service of future scholars.

In a time of global attention focussed on the a-somatic prodigy of AI, Wayne McGregor brings the discussion back to the res extensa by electing the human body as the most sophisticated technology at our disposal. In fact, if the mind has long ago passed the Turing test – that is, the machine has shown that it can successfully mimic intelligent behaviour – cybernetics will be waiting a good deal longer for those same results to come.

Neural networks have no body: they work by processing a series of abstract information flows. But it is the body, the contact of feet with the earth, of interaction with our fellow humans, that builds our perception and the boundaries of our self, which are inseparable from the flesh. And from the heartbeat setting the rhythm of the first performances since the dawn of civilisation, metronome for rain dances and votive displays, in glory to the Divine.

At a time in which science-based predictive systems have taken the place of oracles, the great religions themselves have settled on liturgies that, of all the senses, favour the voice – and yet, after thousands of years, we continue to dance.

We sing away, then, but we don’t give up dancing, for above all else the human substance is movement. This is the Wayne McGregor doctrine. We trace lines of energy with the body, arabesques that stage photographers tend to visualise with the B setting of their optical devices. And if the whole body is intelligence, dance is to be taken as a “philosophical act of communication” – a sharing of human vibrations between the stage and the audience, a sharing of self, in short, with the very flow of life.

Dance is the most primordial of the arts – the purest of the poems of the human substance – and so it is the interaction, the tangle of bodies, the choral experience that puts the “We” ritual into being.

Words always prove insufficient, and it is on the We that McGregor places the tenets of his poetics. Well beyond the staging, with other alphabets, other grammars – constructs of mental harmony and dance – McGregor reaches right into real life, transfiguring our otherwise fading presence into feelings and emotions.

His canon – in its ceaseless otherness and mutability – is the reappropriation of a line concealed on the earth, the place of human substance, the eternal labyrinth we escape to in search for one another, and where we retrace our own steps.

Pure dance, pure poetry is revealed in the fulfilment of the form. This is We Humans. This is Wayne McGregor’s novel.