The award-winning choreographer Wayne McGregor is one of the most exciting dance-makers around. He has just had his contract as choreographer in residence at the Royal Ballet renewed — but don’t get the idea that his work looks in any way classical; he’s there to stretch that company in new, more contemporary areas.

Four years ago, McGregor brought to the Playhouse a piece that resulted from his fellowship working with researchers in neuro-science in Cambridge. They were studying the condition of ataxia (also the name of the work) through which a person gradually loses control of bodily movement. In Ataxia, the eight dancers seem to represent both the failing human body, and in a more abstract sense, the affected brain cells in their agony of increasing malfunction.

Serious stuff, but fascinating, with a lot of high-speed, twisting, gymnastic choreography, organised in an exhausting series of ensembles, duets and solos, which move inexorably towards a disorganised frenzy that leaves the performers lying exhausted on the stage.

McGregor’s new work, Entity, again quarries an area of science, and I asked him how this fascination began.

“Because of my training, I have this great knowledge about how the body works from the outside, and I started to wonder how it works from the inside — the way the mind works in co-ordinating the body.”

With this in mind McGregor proposed what he calls “an artificially intelligent choreographic entity”.

“The entity idea came around from my idea to build a computer programme that could think choreographically, but didn’t generate choreography, and used scientific analysis in the way that a computer programme can generate architecture or music.

“The scientists I talked to didn’t think I was crazy. In fact, they thought it was a great idea, because, to understand the mind, they have to model aspects of it, and if they’ve got a particular expertise, in this case dance, it’s a fascinating research subject for them to investigate how the brain is wired to produce and perform it.

“The programme isn’t finished yet, but basically a computer programme has agencies — an ability to think for itself in certain areas — which it has learned over time through having a living archive (in the form of existing dance work).

“The dancers in the studio get the tasks I set them. They work as they would normally be working, but I would also set an agent on to the task.

“The dancers would make up dance, and a series of agents would start to use the principles of choreography to build this very strange architecture that we could project on a screen and use as grammar for improvising in that environment.

“An agent could also look at a synopsis of the body, take out joint angles, and use that information to trawl the Internet for images based on those co-ordinates. The content on the screen can move in very strange ways, and we can use that again for building new phrases for choreography.

“On the screen you might see a series of points, lines and planes, or a series of kinetic strokes that give you a motivation to move. In the same way that I can make a phrase by looking at a body, the computer can take a sketch of the dancer, re-interpret it, and the dancer can use that as a reference.

“This is a way of getting the dancers to share a visual system, and for each dancer to work with different parts of an image.

“But this is just the beginning. This door that we’re just beginning to prise open has this huge richness of content inside it.”

This is fascinating stuff, but, getting down to basics, I asked Wayne how he would describe Entity to somebody who has yet to see it.

“People have written about my work from a conceptual point of view, which disappoints me, because it’s about what is contained in the dance. For someone seeing Entity for the first time I would say the physical rush of the piece is really exciting, so even if you don’t know anything about dance, anything about science or even anything about the art world, you’ll see bodies do things you don’t recognise, and that, in itself, has a visceral, fantastic impact on you.

“It goes quickly because of that. You’re engaged first of all in a dialogue with the body — that’s my biggest wish — that people get a new sense of the body.

“The other thing is that I’m very interested in working collaboratively, and you can see in the piece the seamless integration between the dance and the science which provided a lot of input into the concept.

"Even if you don’t engage with the concept, it’s a piece that you can just watch and enjoy, take home with you, and maybe think about later.”

Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance are at the Oxford Playhouse tomorrow evening.