A Body for Harnasie

A Body for Harnasie
2024

Company
Company Wayne McGregor

Direction and Choreography
Wayne McGregor

Sculpture Design, Film Creation and AI Development
Ben Cullen Williams

Principal Conductor
Edward Gardner

Music
Karol Szymanowski

Original Dance
Company Wayne McGregor

Sculpture
Technical design: Rob Ashworth
Fabrication: Fabrication Facility
Structural Engineer: CCS-Consulting
Motor Design: Wahlberg Motion Design

Film
Additional AI generation, Creative Technologist: Bryce Cronkite-Ratcliff
Drone Footage, Camera Operator: Oliver Wheeldon
Live action Dance, DOP: Ricky Patel
Live action Dance, Focus Puller: Anıl Duru
Live action Dance, Gaffer: Arthur Miller
CGI and MOCAP, Animator: Yibing He

Premiere dates and venues
26 February 2024, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, NOSPR, Katowice, Poland
6 March 2024, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, London, UK

The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra collaborates with choreographer Wayne McGregor CBE and visual artist Ben Cullen Williams to create a reimagined concert production of Szymanowski’s ballet score Harnasie called A Body for Harnasie.

The project sees McGregor use digitally enhanced choreographic storytelling with technological interventions and visuals by Williams. Through the use of human and digital intelligence, a sculptural video installation is suspended above the orchestra on the stage, reimagining how dance can be created and experienced.

To create A Body for Harnasie, McGregor experiments with the fundamentals of dance, combining live dance with new photographic and film material of the Tatra mountains – where Szymanowski’s Harnasie is set – alongside an emergent AI trained on hours of mountain footage which is accompanied by scans of the mountains that are mixed with motion data from the dances. The work has originated from an analogue live dance, featuring a trio for two males and a female referencing the original protagonists from Szymanowski’s work. The end result is a fusion of creative action created through artificial and human intelligence, blurring the boundaries of what is reality and what is artificial.

“A Body for Harnasie attempts to re-frame Szymanowski’s epic musical work for our times, to create a choreographic object that redefines dance in the concert hall with a physical kinetic sculpture in constant transformation through motion and artificial intelligence. Through this project, the traditional conventions of what is dance and what is space collapses as a new continuum of time emerges. What is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ blurs. Dance, landscape, and AI blend seamlessly. We hope Szymanowski would have been thrilled and somewhat surprised!” Read McGregor's full programme essay here.

A Body for Harnasie is an original co-production of NOSPR The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice (initiator), London Philharmonic Orchestra (with support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute), conceived and produced by Studio Wayne McGregor, co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland. Project partner: Concertgebouw Brugge.

Image: Ben Cullen Williams.
Video: Ben Cullen Williams and Ricky Patel.