Wayne McGregor

0:28Hello, I'm John Wilson. You're about to listen to This Cultural Life. Hello and welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the choreographer Wayne McGregor, one of the most acclaimed, innovative and influential figures in contemporary dance. His works are often the result of creative collaborations with artists, musicians, filmmakers or with scientists to explore technological issues. In 2006, he was appointed as resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet.

1:04He's created more than 20 new works at Covent Garden in that time, including Cromer and Wolfworks, a full-length ballet based on the life and writings of Virginia Woolf. He's worked as a movement director on films including Harry Potter, Goblet of Fire and Mary Queen of Scots. He's collaborated with bands including Radiohead and the Chemical Brothers and choreographed the virtual concert Abba Voyage. having won numerous awards including two Olivier's Sir Wayne McGregor was knighted in 2024. Wayne McGregor welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you, hello. Your job is to tell stories with physical movement.

1:42Does that mean you're acutely aware of the way that we move, how we express ourselves wordlessly? It's so interesting you say we tell stories with our bodies because of course that's what we're doing all the time when we're communicating. If you think that human communication is 80 % physical and 20 % everything else. We're so adept at being able to read others. We often don't think about that. We think first about the words. But actually, we can recognise really early on when somebody's walking towards us, whether we're going to walk close to them or whether we're going to walk around them. We can see the state of your partner's energy the moment you walk home into the room before they even speak to you.

2:19So I think we're all really adept at that. And I think dance is just a process of recognising that and extending it a little bit further. As you say, most of us are unconscious. when we're walking down the room, of those stories that we're telling. What I mean is, are you looking at the way our bodies move and then incorporating that in your work? Well, I think I'm fascinated by lots of the choreographic principles of life, if you like. So I probably will notice the distance that you stand between others in a group. I will notice things about your energy or your flow system. I'll notice probably if you have some kind of blockage in the body and that you're experiencing pain somewhere.

2:54And that's partly the result of being in the studio for 35 years with dancers, seven hours a day, seeing how those bodies feel and act and behave. And you work as a choreographer now. You don't dance anymore. I think you gave that up in your mid-30s. But you're still having to use your body in a very physical way in the studio with your dancers. So you have to, I presume, keep it at peak fitness. I don't think you ever come out of dancing. But of course, I'm now working with these incredible dancers who are all in their early 20s, who have incredible, like, you know, sports science training and technique that was never like that before.

3:29It's kind of completely improved and bodies can do things that they've never been able to do before. So you've got these incredible kind of physical instruments in front of you that you're then trying to choreograph in collaboration. Choreography is a collaborative act. It's a kind of an energy to energy transfer. it's not something you do solely on your own. Do you have to be an emotionally intuitive person in order to recognise or channel that energy? I think you do because I think we're all susceptible to how other people are feeling in a day. But when you're working with a group of artists who are quite volatile, they're expressive, they're moving between states of experience all the time, they might have come from a bad rehearsal, I've got to prime them to get into a good place with this new dancer that they're working with in real time.

4:13you kind of have to be sensitive to that. So if somebody's coming in with their big boots on and sliding along the floor with slouch and that energy feels very contained and inward I've got a choice. I can resist it or I can open it up in some way and I've always found that conversation in that moment is the thing that just opens that up. We're going to explore that through the course of this programme. Let's take you back to childhood first of all. You were born in Stockport in 1970 to two Scottish parents. Tell me about your mum and dad and when did they first come to England? They first came to England in their early 20s.

4:47I think they'd had enough of Scotland. They decided just to pack up, come down. They had no money, start a new life. My grandmother actually was in Stockport at the time. They were great parents, very positive, very warm, very loving. Gave me the opportunity to do anything I tried, but they weren't at all from an arts background. I grew up in a very working-class home. They weren't at all literate in the arts. They never went to the theatre. It wasn't something that was part of their kind of consciousness. But they always encouraged me to give things a go. Have a try. Just try something and see where you go.

5:19They were foster parents as well, I think. They were, yeah. So I grew up with lots of foster young people around, so in a kind of very social environment. I wonder if that's significant, though, because you're an only child biologically but surrounded by other children. Of course, you are working as a team leader in your day job. I mean, that sense of teamwork and people around you all the time. And it's interesting because in a way dancing is all psychology, certainly choreography is. You're in front of large groups of people. You have to manage their kind of energy states to get any creative work or innovation out.

5:50And I think my childhood allowed me to experience lots of different young people going through often very traumatic experiences and out of their home. I think my parents have always been amazing bridges in that relationship between how is it that you feel and how is it that you act? And how is it that you can control how you act in relationship to how you feel? So, as you say, you didn't grow up conventionally in an artistic home, but did you have artistic ambitions from an early age or interests? Well, I think I was a very physical child, so I loved gymnastics and moving, and I knew very early on that I wanted to go for dancing lessons.

6:25Were you hyperactive? Very hyperactive. You know, I was in school plays, I was in the choir, I was in a brass band, I played the piano, I did music theory. I was always doing many, many things. But nobody pushed you into those areas? No, I just, no. That was just instinctive? instinctive? Just tried, just tried. I mean, I think one of the things that my parents were really committed to was that if you tried something, you had to do it for quite a while. You weren't able just to move from one thing to another easily and quickly. So if I took up the violin, I took up the violin for a while and I went through the phase where I didn't want to do it, but had to still do it for quite a long time.

6:55So that notion of practice eventually encouraging your kind of appetite for something was really instilled very early on. I wasn't able just to flit around doing different things. And did you dance at school? I did English country dancing in primary school. Maple dancing? Maple dancing, yeah. But actually, it's quite interesting. You think about dancing in schools now. There are not that many opportunities for young people to have physical touch with another, to kind of work on kind of like spatial logic. You know, when you're working on a maple, you're thinking kind of like choreographically in space.

7:26There's a geometric form. Geometric forms. You have to work as part of an organised group, a distributed cognitive group, if you like. It's choreographed. It's choreography, yeah. and you have to dance to a rhythm and dance to a beat. I think now that that actually was one of the very first moments where I started to think about dancing and enjoying dancing to the extent that I do.

7:54On This Cultural Life, Wayne McGregor, my guests choose the most significant creative influences and inspirations. And your first choice for this programme is a dancer, not Nureyev or Baryshnikov as we might expect but John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever a film which came out in 1977 so you would have been I think probably six or seven years old how were you introduced to him? I think partly Travolta was everywhere in the late 70s

8:23I'd just started ballroom and Latin American dance and disco dance lessons with an amazing woman called Marjorie Barlow on top of Topps Tiles in Stockport and she was obsessed with John Travolta. I had pictures of him everywhere. I just experienced the freshness and the love that he had of being so physically free, of just moving to music and enjoying that and it really, really encouraged me to work hard at dancing. And to emulate the Travolta moves. Of course, yeah. You need all those, the pointed fingers, the wiggling hips. We should be dancing again Dancing again So I think that power of how you have your first imprint in moving or something physical is really, really extraordinary.

9:08Much later, many young people were inspired by Billy Elliot, for example. Now it might be TikTok videos. It doesn't really matter how you start. There's got to be something that actually sparks that imagination that makes you want to go, wow, I want to do that a bit more. And for me, that was him. And Marjorie Barlow, who had these photographs, pictures of Travolta around the dance studio, what did she see in you? I think she saw that I was a fast learner. So I was teaching in that studio when I was about 11. She got you choreographing? Yeah, I had a class on a Saturday afternoon for my friends at school, five o 'clock Saturday class in disco.

9:43She would encourage me to make up my own dances. So often with my partner, I'd make up new versions of rumbas or cha-chas or, you know, kind of like social dancing in that way and explore them and teach them. So I think she saw that I was a fast learner. I was very committed. I never missed a session. So do you think that's where the idea to become a choreographer started? Were you conscious at the time that this might be a future for you? I didn't know it was choreography, to be honest. I didn't know that's what I was doing. I thought I was just dancing. And I think it was much later I understood what choreography was.

10:12In the teenage years, we start to grow at an alarming rate. You are, as you walked in here, I was aware of how tall you are, reminded that you are, what, 6 '2", probably? Yeah, I'm about 6 '2". Not an ideal shape for a male dancer. You usually need that sort of low centre of gravity. So do you think that ultimately steered you towards choreography rather than becoming a dancer? I don't think so. I think it's partly that I didn't really know that there were opportunities to do elite training from my background. I had no idea that was a possibility. So I was completely unfamiliar with classical dance and classical technique.

10:44I was totally unfamiliar with any form of contemporary dance. I really had no understanding that that was something you could do. but I think the thing that steered me most into choreography was wanting to do my own thing and that was partly because I'd done a lot of social dance you know club dance by then in the 90s where you were expressing yourself however you wanted to move and I realized that was really part of my what let's say for now your authentic self I didn't realize that at the time but it was about you wanting to say your own thing in your own voice and so I never really had an ambition to learn a codified style of dance I never had an ambition to dance for anybody else I always wanted to do my own thing.

11:21You studied dance at the University of Leeds you arrived at your campus, Bretton Hall in 1988, so this is just as Acid House and the Rave movement were starting up all around Britain, but especially in the north of England Were you a big raver? I was, you know, Bretton is right in the middle of, between Hull and Manchester both of which had incredible music scene, incredible night scene Music I love the music, I love the kind of repetition and the punch of the movement I love that you feel that music inside your body, it almost vibrates your core. You would see a range of people expressing themselves, some naturally and some on chemical substances, in extraordinary ways.

12:02You would actually see a whole range of physical language that you had never seen before. Very peculiar, very original. Very expressive. Very expressive, no limits.

12:18Over the years your work has been characterised by this extraordinary freedom of expression and also the speed of the movement so it sounds like it is all going back to the rave scene Yeah, it sounds like... I just don't like rules either I've never understood why, even in something like classical ballet that we have to stick to the rules of the past I think, you know, for me, all movement languages are languages which are in constant evolution and you know one can reinterpret those languages in a range of ways and that's extraordinary and exciting to do that. I do think I'm always trying to get back to the essence of what moving is and what moving freely is and that cannot be bound by a conception of what other people think you should be doing while moving.

12:59If I'm struggling choreographically I'll always go back to a feeling of just moving. I'll put loud music on, I'll get in the studio wherever it is in the world whether that's the Paris Opera, my own studio in London or the Royal Ballet and I'll just find a way in through my body.

13:21Your next choice for this cultural life, a pivotal moment in your career, is being in New York in 1991 soon after graduating and seeing a performance by the legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham accompanied by music that was being conducted by the composer John Cage. So before we hear about what you saw and heard, what were you doing in New York? I actually was on those Camp America programmes where I went to teach a group of young autistic children in a camp for six weeks. I did that for three years. I ran a kind of an arts programme. And obviously I spent time then in New York. In New York in those days, it was incredible to be able to see so many outdoor free performances, especially in the summer.

14:00So this was a performance at Lincoln Center. It was Merce dancing and cage conducting. So it was a cage composition. Cage composition, exactly. And the relationships emerge rather than being set by either of the artists early on. So this was the first time really I'd really understood what that kind of like chance procedure would be and a different way of organising and structuring a dance. You could be freer.

14:25He did not compose strictly to the dance. It was two things going on at the same time, which simply coexisted, so to speak. And with these kind of ideas, there was something quite remarkable that could happen. We've always played in large spaces, gymnasiums or museums or open spaces sometimes, so that working in a large scale, I've always found interesting. This sounds like incredibly radical work. It's an extraordinary thing, isn't it, that you could be walking through the park in New York and see Merce Cunningham and hear John Cage. Yeah, and it was amazing. There were people sat outside in full-on dinner suits and there were people who were just there with their rucksack walking past.

15:11And again, you know, this is the power of how we interact or can potentially interact with the arts. That's why I'm so passionate about being able to find opportunities just to have dance anywhere that you won't expect, because that's how it affected me. Of course, then I did a deep dive about what that technique was like, what was the thinking behind that work. But it was really impactful because it was so unfamiliar. It was so alien. I had no clue, no way into reading that work. I didn't know if it was good or bad. I just was like, what is this? But I wanted to find out more and I did. I hope I have enlarged the scope of the movement, the scale of the movement.

15:49I needed dancers who would work in this kind of circumstance with a separation between the music and the dance. He would commission his composer, he would tell them the length this piece is 37 minutes and they would write whatever they wanted to write and then on the night that piece of music would be performed to the 37 minute piece that Merce would have choreographed with design by Rauschenberg who just decided what the design was and those three things would come together only on the first performance and they would be whatever they would be. And that would be that moment and they would move on to something else.

16:23I just love this. I love this kind of freshness, the collaborative nature, the trust in your art form to be able to communicate without necessarily the crutch of the other, the trust in the audience to be able to actually create meaning which isn't necessarily linear, their ability to be able to see relationships. If they let go of the what does it mean question and go, what do I see? If you ask the question, what do I see? meaning then emerges and I just was super fascinated by that. I thought that was just such a brave, incredible way of thinking about a range of art forms working in dialogue together.

16:57In 1992, straight back from New York, you moved to London and then you set up your own company, Random Dance, now called Company Wayne McGregor, of course. That's a really bold move at the age of, you must have been 21, 22 at that time. How hard was it to establish your own company? Well, I mean, it sounds very grand, but at the time I was just working with my friends and putting on a performance at the place right i think if you want to make choreography you have to find any opportunity possible to do that you can't wait for the funding or wait for the commission you just got to make it and i got my friends together and i performed a small piece at the place theater which is brilliant experimental dance theater in king's cross and i performed this piece then a one two and three and after that performance the really brilliant director at the place at the time john ashford who sadly passed said to me that was really interesting get rid of all of your dancers and I'll send you on a solo tour to 12 European countries and of course at first I was like there's no way I'm changing my choreography, there's no way I'm eventually of course I did What were you setting out to do with contemporary dance?

17:59Well I think first of all I named the company Random for a reason, so this notion of randomness, I didn't want to be tied down to one form of dance or one form of context for the dance so I wanted to be able to work on film I wanted to work on stage, I wanted to do a range of things like that. But in those days as well, I mean, and again, this is what's really difficult for younger choreographers today, is the Arts Council had a whole range of schemes that supported early voices in artists. My first grant from the Arts Council was five grand. I was able to get an office, I was able to find a place to rehearse.

18:34John eventually invited me to be resident choreographer at the place. And then he said, just make, just find every circumstance you can to just practice. and that's exactly what I did. You had a support structure. Now it's very hard to imagine that you could do that, set up a company in that way because those financial structures are not there. Also, the rents are so high. I mean, is that a problem for new companies now? It's a huge problem and it's one of the reasons we set up a programme in our studio called Free Space. And we have over 350 artists on this programme. They come and say how much space that they need.

19:08We give it to them for free. they're able to work in these extraordinary studios which again I think elevates their ambition for the kind of work that they want to make they come in there and feel a responsibility to work harder really imagine big but at the same time what I ask back is that they give some kind of community engagement back so they might teach they might do a workshop in exchange for that time and then, okay just to come down a minute what I'd really love to do is you're like that and then I want you to go, peruette

19:42So much of the work that you have done, including work at the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, has been seen as breaking the rules of classical dance, and you incorporate so many movements that are sometimes seen as wrong in classical ballet terms. What makes a movement wrong, do you think? That's a great question. I think so much of our cultural conditioning is based around a very small group of people's opinion about what is good and what is bad, what is possible and what is not possible. And I've kind of always just ignored that. I mean, of course, it's part of the conversation and I read all my reviews.

20:18I love critical reception to the work. I'm curious to see how people see the work, but I'm very conscious that it's their perception conditioned by their lens, the ways in which they've experienced their art. But I think that art forms have to have the flex to be able to communicate in a contemporary way. They have to be boundaryless. And so does it matter that somebody says to me that it's wrong? No, because maybe five people in the audience think it's wrong and the other few thousand think, oh, that's interesting or that's something that actually I've never seen before. But I think when you're thinking about languages, what I'm trying to do is not deliberately set out to challenge the vernacular of classical ballet or classical dance.

20:59I'm just looking at the material that I have, these expert dancers in the case of the Royal Ballet, these phenomenal artistic, creative, technical artists who want to challenge their own training. You know, if you think about somebody like Martha Graham, this incredible postmodern American choreographer, she talked about technique as a way of releasing your creativity, not as something that should be preserved as a thing in its own right, that technique was only to serve the expression, the way in which you wanted to use your voice and what you wanted to say. So that speaks to me as something that really that technique has to be an evolution in relationship to the work.

21:39And so for classical ballet, you need a certain kind of classical technique to be able to do some of the legacy works, and I really understand that. And part of the excitement of watching classical dance is around the interpretation of a dancer in certain roles. But in new work, none of that lexicon, none of that behaviour, none of those codes need to remain the same. Cross roll, that's it Right, from there can you do something Almost like a vulture like that That's it, just stay there Stay there Yeah, great Can you go to the floor like that But then tumble back and tumble back like that So talk us through the process of creating a new work What is the starting point generally Is it a concept, an idea I'm usually starting on projects Three, four years in advance Because partly the way in which the system works is that you have to either commission music or set design way, way before you're in the studio.

22:34So in a way, what you're doing is you're thinking through all of those other art forms first before you get into the studio. But for me, what's really extraordinary about making a new work is, first of all, who is in the work? You're curating your material. You're deciding it's this dancer next to this dancer next to this dancer. And they all have certain gifts. They all have certain biases. So you have dancers in mind as you're conceiving the piece? Yeah, always. And then when they're in the studio with you, of course, because they themselves are rule breakers, they'll always push you to think differently about them.

23:08And that's the dancer I love the most, where I think I've got a hold on them. I think I understand them. And then all of a sudden, they're giving you a different kind of physical language that you don't recognise. and then the actual process in the studio is one of solicitation you know it's one of suggesting it's sometimes I show movement sometimes I describe an idea sometimes we work through an idea together you know it's as much a recursive process as it is a process of me just giving them movements which I've never found very interesting it's more collaborative then with the dancers you're offering up the space for them to interpret or even to improvise I mean I guess I would divide the process into two parts one is generating the language first what is the vocabulary that you're going to use but the compositional phase the bit where you work out what are all of the elements how does the dance relate to the music how does the music relate to sonography or lighting design all of that is part of the choreographic object those are compositional things that I would do on my own You mentioned language a couple of times movement language so what are the moves in that piece what are the identifiable characteristics or the vocabulary of that piece Are you inventing new shapes and forms which you then ascribe language to?

24:20Always. So I, for example, have a notator at the Royal Ballet, and this is an amazing woman who writes down the dance in a notation form called Banesh, which is a bit like music, but it works on a vertical stave. now when you're working with a recognizable language which you know it's easier to write down those moves she has to invent all of the time in the material with me completely different symbols to capture the movement that we're doing so we're using ballet as a basis as a starting off point but that language can move in lots and lots of different directions so say it very simply say if you're thinking about a prouette term which has a very you know in classical ballet has a very kind of formal particularity.