In a striking set - a space defined by three barriers that can be raised and lowered, each like one of those nodding oil pumps in the Texas outback except with a wing in place of a mantis face - Wayne Macgregor's dance unfolds. It consists of a long sequence of evolutions multiplied out of a basic premise, which can only be described as the movement vocabulary of cerebral palsy: the stiff, angular writhing of imprisoned limbs, of spasticities and struggle, limbs and their extremities fixed at the declensions of effortful, limited, half-paralysed semi-mobility. When the dancers emerge suddenly, like Michelangelo's slaves freeing themselves from their half-sculpted marble blocks, to walk off-stage, it is a relief to see ordinary motion, natural flow, the everyday grace of the human form. Everything else makes one hold one's breath in response to the sense of painful and limiting effort.
      Wayne McGregor's intention, described in the programme notes and expressed in a video release of the rehearsal process, was to express something of or about science in dance. Late in the piece some geometric figures are projected in light onto the floor and the dancers at times were loosely aligned with them. There was to this observer no other obvious or meaningful connections between the dance and anything scientific; what there was lay in the fiat of the choreographer, as if he had put a bottle of fruit juice on a table and said, 'This speaks of medieval history.' Retrospect searches for interpretations: was it interactions between subatomic particles, quantum entanglement, the Einstein-Rosen-Podelsky effect, wave-particle duality, chemical valence - ? Then one reads the choreographer's essay, and in it there is a swirl of connections: evolutionary biology, and the analogical idea of memes; neurology and brain-body disconnection (ah! here might be a clue to the manifestation of palsy) and artificial intelligence - but none of these rather disparate three are developed in the notes, and are not (save for the palsy) apparent in the piece itself.
      Should it matter that the piece was said to have a purpose, a programme, designed to say or express something about a subject matter? If it fails to suggest more than the remotest connection with that subject, as happens here, why not ignore the fact and just treat it as abstract dance, and judge it accordingly? Well: perhaps. Certainly the physical skill and athleticism, the mimetic artistry and discipline of the company, are superlative: they are a wonderful set of dancers with superbly intelligent bodies. But it would do them better justice to free the piece of pretension about what it is supposed to say, and let it stand free; for what they danced seemed to say little beyond itself, but was mainly just was what it was - and dance has no need of messages or meanings (unless it explicitly sets out to tell a story as in classical ballet) because it can be so richly sui generis.
      For this observer anyway, although the performance itself was all pleasure to behold, one other thing offered to alloy it: the unhappy propensity of most modern choreography to have no (or no sufficiently apparent) arc of development, of evolution, of increase or decrease of complexities, of addition or subtraction, of movement and evolution in the design. The piece starts, it continues, then it stops; the dancers are doing much the same thing at the end as at the beginning; it is all iteration, and if there are patterns they succeed each other arbitrarily, not with a combining and moving thread of intention that is unfolding in some direction. Even non-programme dance, abstract dance, needs a logic.
      That Wayne McGregor is a choreographer of genius goes without saying; and it has already been said what a wonderful group of artists performed this work of his. He can only get better if he has answers to the questions implied in the foregoing remarks, about explication of a programme if there is one, and about arcs of development, of not-merely-iterative structure, that feeds the hunger of onlooking eyes for events to have some kind, at least, of implicit mind-movement as well as body-movement in their striving towards the condition of art.
AC Grayling