Wayne McGregor
Jenny Gilbert
Wayne McGregor wasn't anyone's idea of a ballet man when he was appointed choreographer in residence at the Royal Ballet in 2007. Before then, and since, his work has been abstract, spiky, verging on dysmorphic. His interest lay not in human stories but in the snap of synapses and the speed with which the brain can relay messages to a hyper-flexible body. Then, two years ago, perhaps sighting the end of that particular road, he made a surprising swerve into narrative with Raven Girl, which last night received its first revival at the Opera House.Raven Girl is a fairytale which pays Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance programme for the first time makes plenty of sense. Since McGregor's frequent collaborator, contemporary composer Max Richter, was also being given his EIF debut this year, the chance to stage the UK première of one of their joint offerings, Kairos (2014) set to Richter's "Recomposed Vivaldi - Four Seasons", was obviously irresistible.That Kairos had Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
On my way to the Woolf Works opening last night, I made the mistake of reading The Waves, Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel. It was a mistake because even the briefest immersion in Woolf’s prose was a thousand times more exhilarating than the 90 minutes of treacly sludge served up by Wayne McGregor and Max Richter in this, the choreographer’s much-hyped first full-length work for the Royal Ballet. It’s not really full-length, though: it’s three self-contained short pieces, each inspired by a novel – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves, in that order – with the portentous in- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
How do you know Wayne McGregor? Dance-goers with long memories might remember Wayne McGregor as the wunderkind who founded his own company and became resident choreographer at The Place aged just 22. Lovers of contemporary dance will be familiar with his company Random Dance, which boasts some of the best dancers in the business and periodically brings sophisticated, hi-tech pieces to Sadler’s Wells. Balletomanes will know him from his work with major ballet companies, including a long-term residency at the Royal Ballet. Cognitive neuro-scientists, anthropologists and other academics might Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Some choreographers get turned on by stories; others by music; yet others by the unpredictable magic of rehearsal room chemistry between dancers. Wayne McGregor, the shaven-headed, lanky, black clad superstar of British contemporary ballet, apparently needs a few research scientists, and a question philosophers have been trying to answer for three thousand years: what is a body?This is the question heading up the programme notes for Atomos, the new piece by McGregor and Random Dance which had its world premiere at Sadler’s Wells last night. Helping McGregor and his dancers to answer it Read more ...
Sarah Kent
While the main gallery is closed for renovation, the Wellcome Collection has taken the opportunity to mount a fascinating upstairs show exploring the way choreographer Wayne McGregor collaborates with scientists.A timeline charting McGregor’s career reveals that it all started back in 1997 when he attended the opening of the Inter Communication Centre in Tokyo and learned that, with their brains wired up to scanners, two people could activate a toy car by accidentally thinking of the same number. This sparked an enduring fascination with the mind and how it acts upon, and interacts with, the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Make no mistake; this is dancing of the highest order. The classically trained members of Wayne McGregor's company Random Dance demonstrate such exceptional mastery of technique that their movements should have one drooling in admiration. And since they wear little more than vests and pants for this production of FAR, every muscle in their perfectly honed bodies is visible as it tenses and releases, flexes and extends. Rather than being entranced by the beauty and fluency of their limbs, though, I found myself watching with cool dispassion. And soon, I realized I was thinking of the dancers Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This is a great spring for dance-lovers. Tucked in for two nights at Sadler's Wells (catch it again tonight) is the return of Wayne McGregor's FAR, well timed to appear just before his latest ballet at Covent Garden next week. Uniquely among choreographers today, McGregor has two lives; two selves; two creative identities. The better known is that cool cult-leader at the Royal Ballet, with his slink-and-fidget on pointe that looks so trendy on classically trained ballerinas. The lesser known is the man whose imagination runs free and intuitively with his own company. Freed from the pointe Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is unusual in art for collaborators to be of equal star-wattage. The pairing of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden was one such. Another, much longer-lasting, was Stravinsky and Balanchine, a partnership of equals that endured for nearly half a century. More recently, Antony Gormley has worked with both Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, to great effect. Can Turnage, McGregor and Wallinger replicate these? This has been the question.The answer is, unequivocally, yes. Wallinger took the lead, presenting a rich brew of possible starting points, which included the idea of the “window” created by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Current affairs can be an on-trend choreographer's nemesis. In the new triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night, you could watch a new video-game war-ballet by Wayne McGregor, while blotting out thoughts of the Taliban suicide massacre in yesterday’s headlines, and Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV, with its modish wrecked train set, while trying to forget that yesterday expensive retribution was demanded of Network Rail for the Potter's Bar train crash. Not wholly helpful associating, as neither piece is among their creator’s best.The evening’s success had to hang on the chiffon frivolity of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If only such a bubble of foolish hype did not follow Wayne McGregor wherever he goes, such bloated talk of reinventing dance, injecting it with brains, and infusing it with new chemical sensitivities and practically supernatural powers, one would be able to look at what his contribution to theatre is more clearly. He is not the Heston Blumenthal of dance. Primarily McGregor can be thanked for bringing some ravishing and expensive lighting design to dance, under which his insectoid dancers twitch and scurry like moths and crane flies attracted to the flame. FAR, his new work premiered Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A Balanchine on a mixed bill is a reminder of what a choreographer should desire to offer his audience: a specific new experience of art each time, not a repeated thumbprint in every ballet. Balanchine grew up in a borderless theatre country - jazz, music hall, Broadway, Cubism, Russian imperialism, folklore, classical piano studies, all soaked his personality and fed his imagination. It is a range of experience that both Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon have grown up without and it made the last of the Royal Ballet’s triple bills a faintly poignant affair. If McGregor and Read more ...