STAATSOPER.TV: PORTRAIT WAYNE MCGREGOR

An adventurous experimentalist, a soul driven by curiosity, who would like nothing more than to integrate all technological advances in every art form in order to show how these developments change our life, the world and, not least, art itself. This is Wayne McGregor. Born in 1970 in Stockport, UK, he fell in love with dance early on, inspired by films like Grease and Saturday Night Fever. He went on to study Choreography and Semiotics, continuing his education at the José Limon School in New York. In 1992 he founded the Random Dance Company, which quickly developed into a kind of aesthetics research centre, a Wayne McGregor studio. Inspiration from art, music, philosophy and scientific research meld together to form an interdisciplinary whole. 

He has been the Choreographer in Residence at the Royal Ballet London since 2006, and is the first person from the free scene to have ever held the position. Since then he has choreographed fifteen works for the Royal Ballet in which he has continued to explore movement on the bases of classical ballet, as in his early 2006 work Chroma to the full-length Woolf Works from 2015. His wide-ranging oeuvre includes productions for the greatest companies of the world such as Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, New York City Ballet, Bolshoi Theatre Ballet Moscow and the San Francisco Ballet. 

Wayne McGregor's works can be seen for the first time at the Bayerisches Staatsballett as part of the 2018 Ballet Festival Week. Ballet Director Igor Zelensky has chosen to add two recent, successful pieces to the repertoire with Borderlands (San Francisco Ballet, 2013) and Kairos (Ballett Zürich, 2014). Both productions are also performed for the first time in Germany. In addition, the three-part programme of Portrait Wayne McGregor includes a new work for the Bayerisches Staatsballett: “It's interesting to work with dancers who are working on new interpretations of existing pieces and to see how they make the material their own and how they present it to the audience. And at the same time I've got the opportunity to create something completely new with the dancers. I'm looking forward to working on a new piece with the dancers at the Staatsballett,” says McGregor about his premiere. The new piece is called Sunyata. While Kairos is considered a more lyrical, harmonious piece and Borderlands strikes us with its sheer power and electric sounds and atmosphere, Sunyata enters the dialogue between these two productions, offering a moment of calm and void. 

Etymologically, the word Kairos comes with heavy philosophic luggage: In its ancient Greek sense, the word denominates the crucial aspect of taking decisions, precisely the very moment when a decision to take action is made. In Modern Greek, on the other hand, the term Kairos simply means “weather”. 
Max Richter’s adaption of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” virtuously melts both facets together. Richter’s music together with the stage, designed by the visual artist Idris Khan, creates a vigorous room for the dancers’ movements. McGregor’s choreography stretches the body as a moment in time, sometimes hiding from the audience’s gaze, contrasting beautifully synchronised sequences against chaos implying movements.

Wayne McGregor also created an entirely new piece for the Bayerisches Staatsballett: Sunyata. For this premiere he worked with the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose “Circle Map” is both a spherical, dreamy as well as concrete physical composition, based on six poems of Persian Sufi mystic Rumi. The four-line poems are reflected in both the music and the number of dancers on stage: Sunyata features four male and four female dancers. The concept behind the term Sunyata stems from Buddhist philosophy about void, where void is not seen as something negative, but rather opening up endless possibilities for creation and development. 

Borderlands is the result of Wayne McGregor’s analysis of Bauhaus-artist Josef Albers, who is known for his colourful, geometric paintings, which play with the spectator’s visual perception. McGregor focuses on the liminal status between two colours and how to transform them into a physical movement. Here, the relationship of dance and fine arts is not one of simple reproduction, but rather implies an interplay between light, costume and music. With his choreographic translations McGregor achieves a fast-paced, highly virtuosic play of perception. Bodies turn into extremities, transitions turn into transformations, eventually even gravity seems defunct.