Wayne McGregor thinks about bodies. All choreographers do, it’s their raw material – but McGregor really thinks about bodies. His dance works have expanded expectations of what ballet and modern dance can do – brain and body working at full stretch, with cool cat collaborators in design and music from Radiohead to Gareth Pugh and Olafur Eliasson. Now that he’s 56, has his own relationship with his body changed? “It’s definitely different,” he considers. “I’ve got an infrared sauna at home, I do that morning and evening. I’ve got two whippets, so I walk a lot. I’m still very physical in the studio – but when you’re looking at a 20 year old who’s firing on all cylinders, I can’t help but notice that I’ve had to adapt. I can’t go full pelt like I used to.”
Even a slowed-down McGregor is more zingy than most. He bounces backstage at the Royal Ballet and Opera, looking sharp in black and white, and still talks faster than anyone else I’ve interviewed. He gives cheerful interview, but he’s no pushover. He’ll calmly refuse the premise behind a question, and he fixes me with an appraising eye. “I don’t know if you do this, but I really object to critics writing while watching dance.” I love my Muji notebooks, so shift guiltily. “When you’re writing, you are accessing the linguistic part of your brain, which is the antithesis of a sensorial part. You can’t be both attending sensorially and writing words down. You are denying yourself some of the very special things that dance does.”
He isn’t just critic-baiting, but mounting a defence of abstract ballet. “In the last decade or so, there’s been a massive push towards narrative in dance,” he says. “Fantastic. Love it. But that’s only one aspect of what dancing does well. Some big cultural institutions are risk averse, so they’re doing titles and properties that people recognise and convert into bums on seats. Dancing isn’t a play, yeah? It is much more analogous with music – it allows you to open channels of perception and communication beyond the literal.”
McGregor has made work based on literature – but they’re hardly neat narrative arcs. He takes knotty material by Dante (The Divine Comedy), Woolf (Woolf Works) and Margaret Atwood (MADDADDAM, which returns next year) and push them into sensation. And his latest triple bill at the Royal Ballet is, he says happily “wilfully abstract.”
He continues, “I said to the dancers the other day, when you do interviews, you often say one of the things you love most about ballet is being a storyteller. That’s fantastic, but it’s not the only thing that you do. You have to look for the how and not the why. So for this evening of dance, I decided all the pieces would be abstract, encouraging people to look at the how. And all of the hows are very different.” Dance, he argues, “is slippery and ambiguous and multi-meaning.”
Two of the works are previous hits: the enthralling Untitled and emotionally resonant Yugen. For the world premiere, Quantum Souls, “I wanted to do something very pure,” he says. “There’s no technology on stage, it’s pure music and dance.” The music is by British Lebanese composer Bushra El-Turk, played by percussion virtuoso Beibei Wang. “Often dance is powered by the music, but here Beibei watches the choreographic text and improvises live around the structure.”
If there’s no story, how does he begin? “It starts with the curation of who I’m working with. For Quantum Souls, as well as the music, he was inspired by Nightfall, “an early science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov, where all I cared about was the dramaturgy of light.” This inspired a striking set design – a “massive yellow open stage” reflecting “this infinity space of lights, like a magical void.” Add to that costumes by Saul Nash, “a young British designer who used to be a dancer. He’s made individual costumes for each of the dancers, like a collection of clothes rather than a set of costumes.”
And “the other part of the equation,” he concludes, “is the dancers.” One of his favourite critical quotes (he reads all of his reviews) noted his “greedy eye for talent.” He guffaws. “Of course I do, why would you not?” He enjoys the alchemy of pairing particular dancers – sometimes because it might be productively awkward. “It’s not sameness, it’s difference that interests me. It feels very alive.”
He clearly relishes the collaboration. “It’s very intimate process making choreography, and you get to know dancers really well over a long period of time. I don’t need to know why changes occur, but I do need to respond to the change in the moment that I’m working with them. That’s why it never gets boring. Dancers’ expertise is so rich – their physical intelligence is upgrading every time they’re in the studio.”
McGregor is a fixture at Covent Garden – but from childhood in Stockport, it wasn’t an inevitable trajectory. “I hadn’t gone to an elite school, I did not know one person when I came to London,” he reflects. He helps young talent gain a toehold both at the Royal Ballet and through his own company’s lush studios in Olympic Park – but isn’t churning out a series of McGregor mini-mes. “I think young choreographers get mentored way too early, before they’ve got something to say. They get mentored out of their individuality. You need a champion, not a mentor.” Like other talents of his generation, he hustled his way into a career, in an era of just enough official support. “It’s sorely missing now. How young makers are even making a living, let alone practicing, is beyond me.”
A lifetime’s thought comes together in We Are Movement, his new book with a canary yellow cover and a cascade of ideas and provocations. “I’d been reading a lot about emotional intelligence or social intelligence,” says McGregor, “and thought: Where’s all the writing about physical intelligence? In my collaborations with technologists and scientists, physical intelligence is what I have on offer for them. They’re not interested in the dancing!” He reminds me how much the body knows. How we know exactly how a partner is feeling when they come in, even before they speak: “no words required.” How “intentional empathy” lets us understand a gesture as it happens – so I know McGregor’s raised fist is playful, whereas a robot would interpret a threat.
“We always think about intelligence as being in the head,” he says, “but our somatic system is the sensing system through which all knowledge pertains. The book is like a practical user guide, not just for dancers, but for everyone to think about their physical intelligence and how to improve it.” Creating dance lets McGregor push his own physical, cerebral and emotional intelligences. “I like to feel terrified making something, and I like a challenge,” he muses before he heads off. “I don’t like the idea of making a piece that I already know how to make. High risk, high reward – that is the only way.”
The Royal Ballet perform Alchemies from 18 April www.rbo.org.uk - We Are Movement: Unlocking your Physical Intelligence by Wayne McGregor is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Tonic, £20
