'The body is a living archive': Wayne McGregor on turning his DNA into dance

The brainbox of British dance is creating choreography from his own genetic code in an adventurous new show. It's the latest experiment at his hi-tech dance HQ, where the lift changes colour and dancers rehearse in playful spaces

In a shiny Airstream trailer, on the roof of his company's new headquarters, Wayne McGregor looks across the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London. This is not your usual dance HQ. But McGregor isn't what you'd expect from a choreographer. The resident brainbox of British dance is always questing for new territory. His work with ballet companies often attracts headlines - it's a world new to extreme moves, music by Mark Ronson and the White Stripes, big ideas about the multiverse - but his own company is a research lab for innovation.

Now, the science geek is using his own DNA, and collaborating with scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, as the inspiration for a show called Autobiography. "If you're looking for a document of my life with a narrative arc about me growing up in Stockport, you'll be frustrated," he grins. Instead, it's Who Do You Think You Are? but with genes. The show began taking shape when McGregor wondered how artificial intelligence (AI) might animate his archive of 25 years' working in dance. This led him to consider the body itself as "a living archive. Not as a nostalgia-fest but as an idea of speculative future. Each cell carries in it the whole blueprint of your life, basically." Your genetic code tells the story of your past - and predicts possible stories of your future.