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Tree of Codes by Wayne McGregor

Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London

The technicoloured brainchild of contemporary choreographer Wayne McGregor, visual designer Olafur Eliasson and composer Jamie xx finally made its London debut this week at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Tree of Codes was inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s artistic book of the same name published in 2010. Foer used the dreamlike series of short tales of Bruno Schulz’s 1934 novel, The Street of Crocodiles, and carved out phrases from each page to create a visually fragmented narrative from the words that remained.

Foer’s black and white pages are given a vibrant sense of life with fifteen faultless dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet and Company Wayne McGregor. The combined companies work seamlessly as one with their elegant hypermobile limbs and captivating dexterity.

A mesmerising beginning plunges the stage into darkness as the dancers’ illuminate the space with spheres of lights that are fixed to their bodies. They race around like a whirling constellation of stars leaving streams of light behind them. The dancing lights form unfamiliar shapes as multiple bodies come into contact in complex lifts. Eliasson establishes a spectacle in the initial stages of his visual design but as we progress it seems that this cosmic opening is completely alien to the remaining work.

The stage lights are finally lifted to reveal a line of mirrored funnels which introduces the beginnings of Eliasson’s mirrored fun house which dominates the remaining piece. A huge segmented mirror fills the back of the stage, reflecting and refracting not only the dancers’ movements but also the whole auditorium. You can feel fellow audience members physically recoil from their reflection as an exposing spotlight steadily sweeps across the crowd.

Eliasson’s design reaches a climactic moment when layered partitions divide the space as if leafing through the sliced up pages of Foer’s novel. McGregor’s choreography becomes a digital-like jumble of distorted multi-coloured layers as the dancers move between the transparent and reflective panels. The brain struggles to keep up with the sensory overload of Eliasson’s disfiguring set, McGregor’s rapid and fragmented movement, and Jamie xx’s complex electronic beats.

Our muddled brains are given moments of clarity where the visual design takes a back seat as a simple white light fills the stage and Jamie xx’s stuttering score eases to a piano melody. Intimate solos and duets evolve in these moments with McGregor’s movement intricately responding to each note with fragments of his beautifully broken balletic vocabulary. The tranquillity is not sustained for long as the piece lurches back to a busy and excitable energy. Tree of Codes creates an exhilarating sensory experience that taps into the modern day appetite for an overabundance of information, digitalized media, and technology. But similar to reality, this surplus of imagery tends to strips away an underlying sense of humanity.

With so much going on there is a danger of excess but this collaboration finds a balance. The evocative electronic score and busy architectural choreography seem to work in particularly perfect harmony. Eliasson’s design – although a dominating force - complements McGregor’s movement. This is collaboration at its most bold and at its finest.

Photo credits: Stephanie Berger

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