Random acts -- and beyond

Shards of feverish, unpredictable movement ricochet through Wayne McGregor’s choreography with the force of an unleashed cyclone. When McGregor himself dances, whipping and whirling, his articulate, attenuated form is an explosion of fractured zigzags.

Pale, bald, tall and rail thin, McGregor is a combination of wraith and waif. Onstage he is fearsome. In person, he couldn’t be less threatening. He’s so charming and gentlemanly you can’t help wondering where all that fierce energy comes from.

His childhood in northern England was, according to him, “utterly, utterly normal,” even if his dancing never was. “I’ve always had a strange way of moving,” he admits. McGregor started dancing lessons when he was 8 and remembers his father, who worked at a golf course, spending evenings busing him to piano and singing lessons as well. After getting a college degree in dance in 1991, he spent a year in New York soaking up the scene. His company, Random Dance, was born in 1992.

Today, McGregor’s career, like his stage persona, is in overdrive. The London-based Random Dance will be making its California debut this month, but it’s been seen in locales as far afield as Azerbaijan, Beijing, Moscow and most of Europe’s major capitals.

At the same time, says McGregor, now 34, he’s been deluged with far more offers to choreograph for films, operas and other dance companies than he could possibly accept. “I have a pretty good sense of what my ballet and opera commitments are up through 2008,” he says.

All of which may help explain why the name Random Dance was intended as something of an escape clause.

“I’ve always been interested in things that are arbitrary,” McGregor says, “and at the point when we started, I wanted to find a name that didn’t define us in any specific way, that didn’t pin us down.”

By now, the 11-member company has acquired definite specifics, notably speed and a sharply etched dexterity. There’s a sensuousness to it too. Each work inhabits a kind of seductive future world as ravishing as it is unpredictable.

Yet as McGregor explains, “this past year Random has been out on tour most of the time without me. So I’ve been trying to challenge myself to work in alternative situations, to do projects with people I respect and can learn from.” Among other things, that’s translated into several months of 12-hour days on the fourth Harry Potter film, “Goblet of Fire,” directed by Mike Newell.

“Usually if you’re a choreographer in films, you’re quite far down the tree,” he says. “You have to go through about 50 people before you can even speak to the director. But because of the nature of this film, I’ve been intimately involved with the producer and the director. We’ve had a fantastic relationship. I’m not allowed to say too much about it at this point, but there are a lot of really big magical set pieces.

“The whole idea of transformation, of otherness, of magical change is something I think you can also see in ‘Nemesis.’ ”

Scheduled for the troupe’s performances at UCLA’s Royce Hall Jan. 28 and 29, the latter is an evening-length work that dates from 2002 and involved a collaboration with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The Henson team concocted strange prosthetic arms that the dancers don for the second half of the piece. These become weird, even sinister, extensions that can lash out with the speed and danger of a rapier or swoop through the air with an odd, unorthodox grandeur.

“I was thinking about extremity and the technology of the body,” McGregor says. “I wanted to reshape the notion of what the body looks like.” The result, part praying mantis, part science fiction, is disturbing and disorienting.

“Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution,” McGregor explains. “One of her punishments was a plague of insects. So if you’re looking for a basic narrative, then the first half is apocalyptic, leading to a transformation that comes through fire. When the world burns, all that will be left is insects.”

The dance concludes with a seven-minute solo by McGregor, one of the few roles he still performs. He dances it in tandem with a celluloid insectoid creature that hovers above him like some spectral demon.

Indeed, McGregor’s choreography often showcases his fascination with the experimental, creative possibilities inherent in new technology. Random was the first dance group in Britain to simulcast a live performance over the Net, and several of his dances involve interactive, motion capture and filmed sequences.

Take “AtaXia,” which the company will be performing in New York this summer at Lincoln Center. The work came about after McGregor was awarded a research fellowship at Cambridge University to collaborate with some neuroscientists on an exploration of the dysfunctional brain-body condition of the same name.

“The whole idea behind ‘AtaXia’ is neural nets,” he says. “What is it to move? What actually happens to the brain creatively?”

The outcome was so successful for both choreographer and scientists that his six-month fellowship has been extended and will play a part in his next piece for Random, “Amu.” The title means “of the heart” in Arabic and also makes reference to Lamu, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Kenya, where he is building a dance studio.

“I’m working with two neuroscientists and a heart-imaging specialist,” he says. “We’re exploring how the heart is connected to the brain and to emotion.”

“Nemesis,” for its part, “has toured to about 20 countries in the past two years, so it’s really grown, it’s bedded in, made a big journey,” he says. “My work is always part of a process, changing, growing.”

‘He’s a poet, a romantic’

“WAYNE is our genius,” says Mark Baldwin, artistic director of London’s Rambert Dance Company, where two McGregor pieces are in the repertory. Baldwin says the choreographer has the focus as well as the self-assurance to work quickly and efficiently. “Wayne’s very clear in the studio, and he oozes charm and confidence. In a world that usually eats its young, he is definitely not your fragile ‘tortured’ choreographer.”

Another enthusiast is Antonia Franceschi, who played a haughty ballerina in the 1980 movie “Fame” and then danced with the New York City Ballet before moving to London. She often teaches the Random dancers and doesn’t hesitate to assert that McGregor is destined to be as influential as William Forsythe is now or even, eventually, as George Balanchine, who rewrote dance for the 20th century.

McGregor has “the pulse,” she says. “I do think he’s a poet, a romantic -- a romantic for today’s audiences. And I also think he’s smart enough to be aware of what his future place in the world will be. Ten years from now, if he keeps going the way he has been, there won’t be anyone to touch him.”

That’s a big if. In addition to everything else, McGregor coupled the Potter filming with a job on “Aladdin” at the Old Vic Theatre, now in the midst of a first season under the artistic direction of Kevin Spacey. His assignment for this Christmastime bonbon was to help a cast of actors headed by Ian McKellen prance their way through some sprightly vaudeville routines.

He also served as choreographer for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest West End hit, “The Woman in White,” which opened in September, and for Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” starring Judi Dench, at the National Theatre.

“I’ve had to find new resources in patience: ‘Left foot, right foot, forward, backward,’ ” he says of these projects. “I’m not known for my patience, it has to be said, but I kept thinking how Jerome Robbins was able to go from ballet to Broadway and stay creative wherever he was working. I’m not comparing myself to Robbins, of course, but he had a fluidity of approach that I’d like to try and duplicate.”

At Random, his next major work, due in September, will feature a new score by John Tavener for full orchestra and five singers. He’s also agreed to do a second work for the Stuttgart Ballet, and Peter Hall has asked him to supply the choreography for next season’s Chicago Lyric Opera production of Michael Tippett’s “The Midsummer Marriage.”

The next few years will also see a consolidation of McGregor’s relationship with England’s Royal Ballet, where he has already devised three pieces. At least two others are in the pipeline.

All of his Royal works feature women on pointe (so far, his own dancers perform barefoot) and, he says with enthusiasm, “Ballet dancers were a revelation to me, they really were: the ideas, the possibilities in their technique, the temperature of a turn on pointe, the speed.”

Edward Watson, who has starred in all of the Royal pieces, might be a classically trained clone of McGregor; he’s a perfect mouthpiece for the choreographer’s eccentric, elastic style. He may also have the explanation for why McGregor can do so many things successfully.

“Wayne loves to accentuate the odd things that aren’t always classically right, to push everything to its limits and then go beyond that,” Watson says. “You really need a strong classical base in order to let it go that far.”

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Random Dance

Where: University Theatre, UC Riverside

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Price: $30

Contact: (951) 827-4331

Also

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: 8 p.m. Jan. 28 and 29

Price: $20 to $42

Contact: (310) 825-2101