In his high-ceilinged dance studio, nestled in the Queen Olympic Park in East London, award-winning British choreographer Wayne McGregor has been working hard on his latest partnership: teaching artificial intelligence to dance.
Working with Damien Henry, technical programme manager at Google’s Arts & Culture in Paris, McGregor has been using an AI-driven tool that can generate its own independent choreography based on hundreds of hours of video footage it has been fed – both from the choreographer’s archives, and from the ten dancers in his company, whose individual styles were captured in solos performed for the technology.
McGregor’s interest in science and technology is not new; he holds an honorary doctor of science from Plymouth University. The new project, he says, came about as he looked back on his 25 year-long career recorded in video and wondered if technology could do anything to help keep the performances fresh.
“I wanted to make use of this massive archive of work in an interesting way,” says McGregor. “So I asked Damien if he could use it to generate something new. It all goes down to the same question that is crucial in choreography: how do you keep creating fresh content?”
AI can already determine many things, from predicting the next word you will type on your phone to recognising your identity in pictures you upload to social media. But anticipating gestures is tricky. To create the tool, Henry says he took inspiration from a post he saw on scientific website distill.pub, which uses a neural network to predict the form of the next letter you will write based on your handwriting in the previous letter. He came up with a similar algorithm capable of making predictions for a given movement. Based on a dancer’s pose, captured through video, the resulting tool comes up with several options for the most likely choreographic sequence to follow, and displays them on screen in real-time.