Wayne McGregor
Choreographer
Wayne McGregor was born in 1970 in Stockport, England. He studied choreography and semiology in Bretton Hall, West Yorkshire and at the José Limon School in New York.
In 1992 he founded the company Random Dance, which has grown into Studio Wayne McGregor, a research center for asthetics. This network includes dancers, authors, composers, programmers and other members who work on the art of movement, on thoughts and partnerships extensively. He has made over 30 works for the company. The interdisciplinary collaboration has the aspiration to reveal themes from the humanities, the genetics, the robotics and the cognitive science in the dance.
Since 2006 McGregor has been Resident Choreographer at The Royal Ballet, the first choreographer from a contemporary dance background to be invited into this role. Here his productions are acclaimed for their daring reconfiguring of classical language. He has made 15 works for The Royal Ballet, including Chroma (2006) and Woolf Works (2015), the latter being a full-length ballet based on the life and writings of Virginia Woolf. His work has also been re-staged and performed by more than two dozen companies including Paris Opera Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, New York City Ballet, Australian Ballet and English National Ballet. His choreographies are also in demand in the branches of theatre, opera, music videos (e.g. Radiohead), fashion shows, TV and film: for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire he acted as movement director.
Wayne McGregor is Professor of Choreography at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and has an Honarary Doctor of Science from Plymouth University. His work with its ambitious and experimental choreography has earned him a multitude of awards including the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and the Critics' Circle Award for Chroma (2006) and the Movimentos Dance Prize from the city Wolfsburg in the category “Best Choreography” for Entity (2009). In 2011 McGregor was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Dance.
In the season 2017/2018 Wayne McGregor brought two of his repertoire pieces to Munich: Kairos (Ballett Zürich, 2014) and Borderlands (San Francisco Ballet, 2013). He also created an entirely new piece together with the Bayerisches Staatsballett: Sunyata.