Walking through the bowels of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, which resembles - as is traditional in buildings with airy, elegant public spaces - a warren of tired hospital corridors, it’s head-swimmingly hot. That’s because of the dancers, I’m told, to keep their muscles warm so they don’t get injured as they train, rehearse and perform; Olympians disguised as swans, squabbling aliens, or anguished poets.
I’m here to meet the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey, a reimagining of Jim Henson’s 1982 cult epic The Dark Crystal (hence the squabbling aliens) has just opened in the ROH Linbury Studio, danced by members of his own company, Company Wayne McGregor (CWM).
His next, a collaboration with the late Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, set to music by Anna Thorvalsdóttir with costumes designed by Burberry’s Daniel Lee, premieres on the ROH main stage next week. He’s also in his third year as director of the dance biennale in Venice, for which he has commissioned seven world premieres from other artists, and his new piece for the National Youth Dance Company, Novacene, will play at Sadler’s Wells in June as part of a tour.
Tall and thin with long limbs like willow branches, preternaturally youthful (well, I mean, he’s 53 but he could be 40) with an elegant bald head and massive puffy basketball boots, Wayne McGregor looks, as the dancer and choreographer Oona Doherty has put it, “like he’s from the future”.
He also couldn’t be nicer, welcoming me with a hug, ushering me onto the only comfy chair in his tiny dressing room and proudly showing me pictures of the house he and his partner Antoine Vereecken, a former dancer who oversees McGregor’s work as it’s performed by companies around the world, have built in Kenya (obviously it’s a minimalist paradise).
For his new show, McGregor met Herrera, whose bold, stark abstraction he admired, at her studio in New York, where he’d gone to invite her to design a set for Covent Garden. She was 102. “She literally did it in six weeks,” McGregor says. “She was like, I gotta get this done. Just in case.” Herrera died last year aged 106. “I just feel sad that she didn’t see it at that scale,” McGregor says. “If we hadn’t had the Covid hiatus she probably would have.”
There’s something about McGregor’s work – from his first big Royal Ballet hit Chroma in 2006, an exploration of the expressiveness of the human body, to Woolf Works (inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf) and The Dante Project, which is based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – that is immersive even if you’re nowhere near the stage.
Watching UniVerse last week, I was captivated and transported into his weird, dark world, even while having no clue what was happening (I hadn’t, at that point, seen the film). It’s safe to say that McGregor’s not massively into narrative, per se.
“There are lots of different ways to tell stories, and I think we don’t have to always tell stories that are so explicit,” he says. “And I think dance does that really badly anyway. You see any of those heritage ballets unaided by the programme notes and you’re like, what the f*** is going on?”
This lack of reverence for the classics is slightly surprising when you consider he’s been in residence at the RB since 2006. He loves it though – not just for the opportunity to make extraordinary, large-scale work but also to be a catalyst for change, helping the ROH to embrace more contemporary work, bringing in new voices – Joseph Toonga, who attended one of McGregor’s early youth projects in East London aged around 15, was appointed as the RB’s Emerging Choreographer in 2021.
McGregor’s curiosity – about technology, the human body, art, everything – feeds into everything he does, whether it’s as movement coach on the Harry Potter films or helping to create the mind-tricking ABBAtars that have made ABBA Voyage such a huge hit.
He believes strongly in the responsibility of major dance organisations to be “permeable” and provide opportunity where once it might have been perceived as a closed shop. But he’s frustrated at how that expectation seems to be growing just as arts funding and investment in arts education is reduced.
In the face of increased energy costs, rising inflation in material costs, and suppressed box office revenue due to a drop in tourism, this year the ROH’s Arts Council England grant was cut by 9 per cent, from £24,471,000 to £22,268,584 per annum (equating to a real terms cut of around £4.7m – 19 per cent – on top of the 10 per cent real-terms cut the organisation has experienced since 2017/18). Many organisations lost their funding altogether.
“I’ve just been at the Paris Opera House, and was reminded that the French cultural budget is something like €3.6 billion a year, and our Arts Council budget for the whole country is under £500 million,” he says. “When you think about Germany or France and the way in which they value culture, we are definitely being starved of the richness that all the arts can offer.”
Keeping CWM going is “a real struggle. The whole Brexit fiasco has caused phenomenal problems for international touring companies. We would have made about 70 per cent of our annual income around international touring. I’ve got an international company with dancers from all over the world, where I pretty much have to employ somebody just to do visas full-time.
“Freight costs, the new paperwork for freight, the extra expense of bringing British companies because of visas making theatres a little bit more risk averse - that whole international picture is much more challenging than it has ever been before, because of Brexit.”
You can hear the responses now. Tour nationally! Level up! “The national model doesn’t work,” he says. “It never worked. Some city would offer you £2,000 pounds to go there, and it would cost you £16,000 or something to put on the show. It was just a visibility thing. So in combination, that’s really tricky.”
SWG held onto its National Portfolio Organisation status in the last round of funding, but it’s working to “pivot and think about other ways in which we can actually make our work” he says. “Because I’ve been interested in AI XR [extended reality], VR [virtual reality], AR [augmented reality], more of the science, Metaverse kind of stuff, we’re looking at how we can work in partnership with other people to build dance experiences that are really interesting in that way, and how to monetise that.”
They’ve been working with Google to explore the possibilities of a movement bank; an AI system that searches for gesture (if you imagine that you can recognise a gesture as distinctive to someone, and then extrapolate all the possible gestures or movements that might be made by any given person, then you get a sense of the many artificial iterations that it might be possible to bank, and then use to, say, recognise someone from CCTV, or create an animated figure, or any number of other uses, not all of which are benign). Does the recent spate of dire warnings from AI pioneers give him pause?
“Yeah, I think it should absolutely give all of us pause” he says. “They’re saying: ‘Wake up, we have to have intelligent conversations about AI.’ But one of the reasons we’ve been interested in working in technology is that we want artists to be part of the conversation about the ethics of technology, its application.
“My personal view is, there’s a lot of really exciting things happening in AI,” he continues, “but we need to have sophisticated dialogue and debate about what the repercussions are, and be more educated about what actually is happening. So much is happening behind closed doors, and we don’t really understand the ramifications of it. We need to find policy and strategy and create conditions under which the development of AI can be done thoughtfully, because it is going to happen, whatever.”
The Google collaboration is a prime example too, of why, in his view, Rishi Sunak’s recent announcement that maths is to be elevated to the be-all and end-all of education (I’m paraphrasing) is “bewildering”.
“Think about how innovation or creativity works; how the brain processes novel ideas, and how you can apply them in different directions,” he says. “You need to be able to think in different ways. One of the ways in which you can think is mathematically, and that’s amazing. But the other way, that we do most, is think with things – we think with objects all the time, through our body.” Think about how you remember, or organise your thoughts – maybe you’ll grab a pencil and write a list, or draw a diagram, or in explaining something, you’ll visualise it using your hands.
“Dance is so redolent of lots of ways in which we think. It seems crazy to me that moving towards more and more poverty of cultural education would be beneficial to us globally. And yet after all of the work of artists and thinkers and philosophers explaining it, still politicians seem not to understand it.”
The likely results make no sense. “There’s a whole range of young people who might not be predisposed to think mathematically, but incredibly predisposed to think with objects, who are not going to be inventing the next iPhone. Why would you do that?” he laughs, incredulously.
He has sympathy with the idea of levelling up – up to a point. McGregor grew up in Marple, Stockport (about three miles from my teenage home in Hazel Grove – he kindly corroborates my long-held and never-believed conviction that Kylie did panto at the Davenport Theatre). He saw dance at the Royal Northern College of Music, and the Contact Theatre, both in nearby Manchester, but would have “loved more access to more interesting art experiences in Stockport growing up.
“It is really important that you have direct access to [the arts] close to you, in a way that you can get to. But we should be aiming to expand the resources. Why f*** up London, which is an amazing cultural center with incredible companies and an amazing reputation, at the service of something that also should be done?”
London’s cultural landscape is “an incredible achievement,” he says. “It’s economy boosting; there are all these brilliant reasons why the arts in London are fantastic. And we can do more of this nationally – why are we not doing both? We shouldn’t be pitting artist against artist, we absolutely have to expand the resources. It’s point-point-point-whatever a percent of the overall UK government budget. We need to expand the provision by putting more resources everywhere. Levelling up excellence everywhere, including in London, should be something we can manage.”
It’s time for him to warm up for rehearsals (I’m still boiling). He gives me another hug and cheerfully rebuffs my obsequious marvelling at how much he’s got on his plate. “We all have the same amount of hours in the day, right?” He says. “I just show up, throw some moves and leave.”
UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey is at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House until June 4. Novacene with NYDC will be at Sadler’s Wells on June 3. Untitled 2023 is at the Royal Opera House from June 9-17
