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.”
