‘Professor Sir Wayne McGregor CBE’ runs the headline to a biographical essay in the programme for the Royal Ballet’s triple bill of his recent work. Knighted and honoured at the heart of the dance establishment, McGregor has a solid reputation as the trusty insider who is also a radical outsider. What a dangerous place for an artist to be.
Yet he is without question someone of considerable stature. With intelligence and persistence, he breaks through barriers and dares to do things differently. Adept at establishing creative partnerships, he moves tirelessly across all forms of dance, from manipulating the avatars for the Abba light show to inspiring the young at his east London dance school and directing the dance biennale in Venice. His research into computer technology and the more abstruse reaches of bioscience runs deep. He’s just published a book explaining his practice, curated an exhibition at Somerset House, and won another Olivier Award. As well as being a tireless ambassador for the cultural sector, he’s a nice guy, too.
I only wish he would pause and take stock. Perhaps the rest of us need to catch up; perhaps he needs to slow down. Because I don’t think everything he does is as wonderful as we keep being told, and what’s on view at the Royal Ballet, where he has been resident choreographer since 2006, demonstrates limitations as well as strengths.
Both his brand-new work, Quantum Souls, and the first revival of Untitled, 2023 offer abstract, wilfully shapeless encounters between a group of humanoids engaged in feral mating rituals lacking any erotic dimension. These undifferentiated figures come and go, in playful earnest, but there is no logic, no destination or trajectory, to their jerking and thrusting, their extreme bends and leg extensions. Bodies here are treated as objects, ruthlessly stretched, inverted and exploited. No emotional variation emerges, and although one reads that the dancers in Quantum Souls are making ‘live decisions’ that interplay with the improvised music (provided by a virtuosic Chinese percussionist, banging away across a barrage of surfaces like a demented master chef with a hundred pots on the boil), there is no obvious relationship between them.
Except for its flintily elegant minimalist backdrop by Carmen Herrera, Untitled, 2023 is instantly forgettable – McGregor’s choreography at its most generic. Quantum Souls, much too long though it is, lingers longer thanks to some staggeringly lithe and fluent dancing from Melissa Hamilton, William Bracewell, and Emile Gooding as well as a powerful quartet sequence brilliantly executed by Marianna Tsembenhoi, Liam Boswell, Joseph Sissens and Viola Pantuso. (The Royal Ballet is burgeoning in young talent at the moment.) As with much of McGregor’s work, the stage is ravishingly lit throughout by Lucy Carter. But the effect is marred by Saul Nash’s gratuitously hideous costuming.
I can wax more enthusiastically about Yugen, disciplined as it is by the strong frame provided by Leonard Bernstein’s exultant Chichester Psalms and chaste pillared designs by the ceramicist Edmund de Waal. In responding to music that isn’t just vaporous droning in the intense inane or smash crash wallop, McGregor shows he can create dance that has some tonality and subtlety – and when Marco Masciari takes centre stage, it finds grace and humanity too. More like this, please.
I had hopes for Shobana Jeyasingh’s We Caliban, but they were disappointed. It’s a wander through The Tempest, minus Ariel or any note of comedy, sprinkled with some GCSE notions about colonialism conveyed through a voiceover and video projections. The movement, inflected with both the sinuous Bharatanatyam of Jeyasingh’s southern Indian roots and the squatting earthiness of Martha Graham’s school, is anodyne and lacking in drama and character. The dancers seemed disengaged, and alas so was I.
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