Pointe shoes and coloured costumes are thrown into the mix, alongside choreographies of love and desire, and so on.

These are phenomenal stage scenes, signalling something like the birth of the universe.įrom there on, McGregor leads us through a sequence of movement pieces that take us from a primeval, Adam-and-Eve, flesh-coloured costume sort of innocence to a massing of bodies reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s earthly delights. They kick off the performance in pitch dark, as invisible figures with small lights attached, dancing themselves into mesmerising constellations.įrom here, another fascinating sequence: a row of performers invisible but for an arm pushed through a mirrored funnel, the choreography refracted and multiplied into something like a fleshy flower, or a supernova. All the heavy lifting in Tree of Codes is done by McGregor’s excellent dancers. Very disciplined play with perception is at the heart of each of these artists’ works, but in very different and not necessarily related ways. Reflections amplify performers into a whole society. Centre-stage, Wayne McGregor translated – perhaps – the leap between nature and technology, suggested by the title, into a complex choreography of atomic complication from base elements to fully formed society. Jamie xx used an algorithm to turn such cut-up pages, their words and spaces and voices, into vocalisations and rhythmic structures. Take the right letters out and “Street of Crocodiles” became “Tree of Codes”. Foer literally cut up Shulz’s words, all-but-excising the heavily symbolic family narrative. The thread of connections between these artists’ works is tenuous and very light in touch. The work spins off Jonathan Safran Foer’s lite postmodernist novel Tree of Codes, itself a take on Polish avant-garde writer Bruno Schulz’s 1934 collection of short stories, Street of Crocodiles. Manchester International Festival commissioned Tree of Codes as a collaboration between contemporary ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor, installation artist Olafur Eliasson and electronic producer-turned-musician Jamie xx (of The xx), three artists with distinct, so-far-unrelated practices. No doubt this is the hidden expectation behind so many complaints of it being a “cold” performance. What we are often taught to expect from theatre – a gripping narrative rounded off with emotional catharsis – is a misleading framing for this work. When it comes to the possible plot, emotions or even themes expressed, your guess is as good as mine. It would do great disservice to Tree of Codes to consider it in dramatic terms.

Foer tree of codes