Watch Scanner discuss his Ignite collaboration wtih Wayne McGregor

There’s only one point in our interview when the choreographer Wayne McGregor slumps back in his seat, and that’s to make a point. “I can’t work with the kind of dancers who sit back,” he says, and for a nanosecond he settles. Then he zips forward: “I like dancers to be in a state of preparedness, always on the front foot. People who have a voracious appetite.” Voracious is a favourite word of McGregor’s. He’s interested in pretty much everything - especially science, technology and visual art. His background is in contemporary dance, but, after the wild success of Chroma for the Royal Ballet in 2006, he was invited to become the company’s resident choreographer. It was a good pick: they get not just an artist on top form, but a provo-cateur, a restless mind that can’t help making connections.

Sitting on the amphitheatre terrace at Covent Garden, the shaven-headed McGregor works an amiably sci-fi look in huge grey-tinted shades. His work with the Royal Ballet has added zest to the company, and, at the same time, he and his contemporary-dance company, Random Dance, continue an extended investigation into the human mind and body, working with cognitive scientists and heart experts. How do brain and body affect each other in movement? How do we think? The pieces themselves screw these ideas into fierce movement: his most recent work, Entity, was a blood-coursing joyride, a visceral as well as intellectual thrill.

The inquiry reaches an apogee in January, when McGregor will create a new piece for Random under the scrutiny of cognitive scientists at the University of California, San Diego. “I’ll make a piece as I would always make it,” he explains, “but the dancers will each have three cameras trained on them, and there will be 12 neuroscientists watching. We’re looking at collaboration cognitively.” Few artists would expose their process in this way: what on earth do the boffins make of him? “The simple word is ‘stimulating’,” says Phil Barnard, of the cognition and brain-sciences unit at Cambridge University. “He’s not just a smart choreographer, he’s a smart man.”

McGregor becomes even more excited as he explains the two-way research process. “I’m interested in how we can provoke dancers in different ways. With these kinds of interventions, the body behaves differently, because it has to solve unfamiliar problems.”

Another piece of research prompted the teasing project that kicks off the new season at Covent Garden. The Deloitte Ignite event is a three-day sensory jamboree of installations, experiments with sound and light, even a chocolate tasting. McGregor was fired by the suggestion that there are way more than five senses - scientists propose anything up to 21. These are physiological or emotional apprehensions, “senses you know exist, but haven’t quite been identified”. He has commissioned artists such as Julian Opie, Scanner and Jane and Louise Wilson to engage with those ideas and with the fabric of the Royal Opera House itself: even the escalators will trigger a sound-scape. Visitors can watch Douglas Gordon’s film about the soccer star Zinedine Zidane or wade through a roomful of feathers while Jo Malone fragrances waft over them, in a mad response to Swan Lake.

There’s also a growing buzz about McGregor’s new piece for the Royal Ballet; the BBC has already scheduled a live broadcast. It will explore ideas about what lies beneath - “under the skin, under the skeleton” - with designs by Opie. “He’s never collaborated before,” says McGregor, rather chuffed. “I always think he takes the essence of movement. He did 1,500 photos of the dancers in his studio, and the sketches were stick figures with round heads, but I could tell you who the dancers are: they all have their kinaesthetic signature.” The set includes a full-body-height LED screen across the stage, showing figures walking back and forth.

Does he discuss the concepts with his dancers? “I don’t. Sometimes it gets in the way. I get a lot of material, find out what the territory is and let the structure emerge.” The Royal’s dancers, who mostly work on classical ballets by dead people, respond eagerly. “I’m very physical in the studio, which they find captivating. They take the challenge and surprise themselves.”

To watch the sound artist Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, discuss his Ignite collaboration with the choreographer Wayne McGregor, go to Deloitte Ignite, Sept 12-14; the new McGregor work opens on Nov 13 (www.roh.org.uk ); Random Dance tours Entity this autumn (www.randomdance.org )

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