Two weeks ago, Wayne McGregor was hogging the applause in the Royal Ballet's New Works season with his glittering, grown-up duet Symbiont. This week, he's featured in the Greenwich and Docklands Festival with a work created for 32 amateur dancers along with his own company Random.
Two different worlds, yet it's a measure of how fast McGregor has matured that both fizz with equal invention and energy and that the dancers from east London look as stretched and flattered by his movement as those from Covent Garden. During the past few days, children and locals from Stratford have been made to feel as good about themselves as the Royal Ballet's Edward Watson and Deborah Bull.
As well as being a community project, Field was conceived as a showcase for the cavernous magnificence of Stratford's local cinema, the Rex. In the show's pre-publicity, we were promised that a team of digital artists would be transforming the huge "urban shell" of this art deco building into a kind of electronic dreamscape, through which the live dancers would move.
In fact, the technology featured in Field turns out to be far less spellbinding than that which we're used to in McGregor's work. The dancers perform on a conventional stage, which doubles as a 3-D screen on which footage of people and landscape is projected. But interestingly the modesty of the technology becomes a virtue rather than a disappointment. For in some ways Field is the most intimately human work McGregor has made.
One factor is his untypical use of live music, specially written by composer Tunde Jegende, whose breezy fusion of Baroque, South East Asian, jazz and minimalism generates a far more extrovert quality than the electronic scores McGregor generally favours. Jegende's restless sonorities and pulsing rhythmic structures stimulate McGregor's own musical invention, and give a physical warmth to the virtuosity of Random's dancers, who open the show in a series of solos and duets. These actually feature modern dance at its most technically powered, with extravagantly stretched lines of movement sliced into drastic angles or teased into edgily delicate ripples. Yet as the local dancers are gradually incorporated into the work, it is extraordinary how seamlessly the two teams blend and how the amateurs become assets to the dance rather than liabilities.
McGregor certainly exploits the latter's strengths, giving the younger ones moves based on hip-hop and gymnastics, the older ones more low-key social dance steps, which he then breaks down into tiny modules of movement and reactivates into his own distinctively hyperactive style. He also enjoys the varieties of body size, placing tiny tots in sculptural contrast with more chunky adults and he deliberately retains the colours of their personalities.
Within the kaleidoscopic, shifting patterns created by the 40 dancers, there are moments where the stage jitters with the anarchic energy of a playground, and moments too where it settles into the more orderly fun of a ballroom. In one unexpectedly poignant duet, one of Random's dancers is partnered by a middle-aged Asian man, whose courtliness and calm inspire you to picture him practicing t'ai chi on the banks of the River Lea.
Of course, McGregor relies on his own dancers to weave a thread of virtuosity through the main fabric of the dance, but it's often surprisingly hard to tell the two groups apart. The pace of the choreography changes so fast, its ideas come in such quick profusion that despite its length (an hour), it rarely flags. Nor do Stratford's dancers. Their discipline and focus are impressively unwavering and it's a tribute to them and to Random that Field is community dance with a genuinely professional edge.
