Long before Wayne McGregor became a star choreographer famed for cerebral experimentation and edgy imagination, he was a disco fiend. His earliest inspiration was John Travolta. Not cool, Pulp Fiction-era Travolta, but the glinty-eyed, gyrating disco bunny from Saturday Night Fever and Grease. “What I’ve always loved about him is his effortlessness,” McGregor says. “I think that’s what makes a great dancer: effortlessness and spontaneity, whether you’re on the dancefloor or the stage.”
The disco beginnings make sense. McGregor came from a modest 1970s Stockport household with no access to elite ballet schools, and his first dance teacher, Marjorie Barlow, who ran a Latin and ballroom studio, had a poster of Travolta on her wall, too. Maybe as a result of these early years, McGregor has spoken of dance in iconoclastic ways: as an opportunity to “misbehave beautifully” he said in a Ted Talk, and of ballet as a 21st-century art form that should evolve and change, on Newsnight. He has a track record of collaborating with non-dancers as well: he worked on the first Harry Potter film and has since been movement director to the likes of Thom Yorke, Olafur Eliasson, the White Stripes and Nick Knight, alongside coders, neuroscientists, software engineers. He is currently working with Ian McKellen on Hamlet; Margaret Atwood on adapting her climate trilogy, MaddAddam; and the Royal Ballet/Paris Opera Ballet on adapting Dante’s Divine Comedy.
“So,” I ask, “what about Travolta? Would he want to collaborate with him now?” McGregor pauses, as if trying to think of a courteous way to say, “No!”
“I’d love to meet him. I bet he can still dance. I’d love to say to someone like that that even though you wouldn’t have expected it, you inspired me. It’s really important for people to know how much you inspire them.”
McGregor is sitting in his vast, state-of the-art east London studio. Sunny, unassuming and with no hint of ego, he still has the silhouette of a gangly, track-suited teenager at the age of 51.
Right now, he is settling into his tenure as director of dance at the Venice Biennale. He was appointed this year, and is hoping to use role to make dance more visible and provide a platform to those not on the mainstream radar. His 10-day programme includes well-known names such as Mikhail Baryshnikov alongside break-dancers and acts inspired by rave culture. There is also Oona Doherty, a working-class dancer from Northern Ireland, and Germaine Acogny, a 77-year-old Senegalese and French choreographer. “I wanted to do something that had an even wider lens,” he says. “That’s why I thought of Germaine. She’s just an unbelievable woman.”
He has long been interested in older performers, he says. So often we think of dance as a young person’s game, but that’s not necessarily the case. “I don’t think age is a barrier,” he says. “It shouldn’t be. We need, in dance, to slightly rebalance what it is we’re watching and what we’re expecting.”
When he made Woolf Works (2015), his first full-length production for the Royal Ballet, inspired by three Virginia Woolf novels, he enlisted Alessandra Ferri as lead dancer when she was in her 50s and post-retirement. “For dancers, there’s usually a moment when you’re 35 or 40 where you feel that perhaps you’re not technically as proficient as you once were, although you have all this somatic intelligence – all this stuff that the body knows through experience, and an emotional intelligence that you don’t have when you’re a young artist. If you’ve got that, you want to be using it. Perhaps it’s also because I’m now in my 50s and I’m thinking, ‘Well, my body is changing.’”
Changing how? Can he still do the things he used to? “No, but I wouldn’t want to. Letting go is part of the process of moving forward. I’ve not got the physical power, the flexibility or the range that I used to have. But what I do have is a different way of thinking about my body and organising my connections with people.”
As a choreographer who has created some breathtakingly kinetic productions, has age impacted the work he creates, too? No, he says. “I’ve got these amazing 21-year-olds who are hyper-flexible and extraordinarily musical, these bodies that are just extraordinary. Why would you ask them to perform to your limits?”
But there are certainlydays he feels his age, he adds. “I’ve absolutely had that moment when you think about mortality in a different way, about what’s next, what you want to devote your time to. Also, I’m in a room all the time with beautiful people and mirrors everywhere. Sometimes I think the best thing is to take my lenses out and have a blurry day. If I’m having a bad day, it’s lenses out, just blur.”
In his Biennale presentation speech in April, McGregor said the pandemic had “decimated” the dance world. During the first lockdown, he kept to a daily routine of walking his two whippets. He and his Belgian-born partner of 17 years, Antoine Vereecken – a former dancer at McGregor’s company who is now principal re-stager of his ballets around the world –, spend an hour and a half out with the dogs, even now. “We literally wake up, feed the dogs, then out, whatever the weather. It’s partly for the exercise, but partly for clearing our heads and setting up the day so we’re not starting with emails.”
There was a welter of cancelled shows at the beginning, which he judiciously rescheduled for 2021 or 2022. But like so many others, he didn’t believe the lockdown would last for longer than a few months. “At first I thought, ‘Ah this is OK. I’ve not had this kind of legitimate time off, I’ll do a bit of Netflixing.’ But then we realised the seriousness of the situation. My company makes its money frominternational touring and from projects that come in.”
Did he think it was at risk? “Yes, definitely, because no arts organisation has massive reserves. We live very much hand to mouth. But for me, it was more the human cost. You realise when you’re building a company, it’s the people who are important and not the thing itself.”
Having formed Company Wayne McGregor in 1993, he has also been resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet for the past 15 years, and it felt like a red alert over there, too, even though it’s a much bigger organisation. He made the decision to support 300 freelancers by setting up a scheme that gave them a Covid-secure area in which to meet, dance and train. “I decided not to make Zoom films, and with the little money we had, together with a lot of donations, we set up RESET so freelancers could keep training their instrument. Dancing is an activity you do with people. It demands other bodies.”
Even for non-dancers, the pandemic has changed our relationship to the body, he thinks, for better and worse. We are reminded of the criticality of touch, but must keep distanced from one another. “We think about our hands right now. They’re like a battleground. We’re sanitising them all the time. We literally recoil after touching someone. All of a sudden, the pandemic has thrown us into a different way of doing something we did naturally. So now we’re conscious of our hands in a way we weren’t before. We’ve had to think about a 2m distance. Those are all, in a way, choreographic exercises. We have become more conscious of movement and touch – the things we used to take for granted – and I think that’s a good thing. Attention to the body is important. We’ve recognised how important physicality and moving around the world is to us.”
McGregor’s love of dance was there from the start, but his path to it was unconventional. He was brought up in a loving, working-class family, and his parents did not have a lot of money – his mother worked in an accounts department, his father as a greenskeeper. But they devoted their energies to their only son and urged him to pursue his passions.
“They are Scottish but moved to England in their early 20s with something like 50p in their pockets. They aren’t from an arts background, so it wasn’t like we were listening to Mozart at home. But they said: ‘What things are you interested in? Give it a go, give it a go.’ So I was in the choir, I played trumpet, horn, violin, piano. I did gymnastics and amateur dramatics. My poor dad drove me from one club to another, and it’s the confidence you get from that unconditional support. They’ve been amazing, amazing parents. They are retired now, and they come to every single opening, whether in Japan, Taiwan, London or New York.”
He started dance classes at around seven years old, and alongside Travolta the inspiration, there was also Marjorie Barlow, the Latin and ballroom teacher. “She must have been in her 70s by the time she was teaching me. In those days, if you were good at Latin and ballroom, you went into competitions, but she was very against competing. Instead, she encouraged me and my partner, Samantha, to make up our own dances. That’s honestlythe first time I started to make choreography. I began teaching with her. At 12, I had my own disco classes. She paid me too. I had to open up the studio, take out the trash and all that stuff as well, which I was really happy to do.”
She was one of his earliest champions, he says, and he has been helped up the ladder by such maverick figures throughout his career. When he came to London at 22 after a degree in drama and dance from Bretton Hall, he didn’t know a soul. “I hadn’t been to a major dance school, I hadn’t danced with a major company, I wanted to do my own thing. I literally didn’t know anybody. I had to start building relationships from scratch… People talk about me being at the Opera House. Obviously, I have amazing privilege being in these big, culturally elite organisations. But it wasn’t so easy starting out; I’ve never felt like an insider.”
We all need champions, he reflects, particularly those who are willing to take a bet on the outlier. “There are those people who are not looking for the safest bet, or for the one with a proven track record, or the one who’s recommended by 15 other people. They’re scanning the landscape and going, ‘Oh this is interesting, let’s have a punt and give them support.’ It’s how I got on and that’s what I try to do now with people. I’m seeking all the time. It’s about finding kids like me and giving them a pathway into this incredible life you can have as an artist.”
He is disturbed by the government’s latest proposed cuts to arts education, which will hinder those who come from financial disadvantage. “How do you support yourself doing artistic practice? You have to get another job. But how do you balance a job in a supermarket with physical practice? It’s very, very hard. Obviously when you have parental support it’s a different thing.”
In terms of the past year, some good things have come out of it for him. He has written his “plague year” book on physical intelligence and is excited about a motion-capture project he has been developing that will be announced next April (“Think beyond dance!” he says). And, however tough events have been for the industry, some have contained vital lessons, such as the BLM protests of last summer. Chloé Lopes, the first black female ballet dancer at Berlin’s Staatsballett, spoke about her experience of racism last December. Companies are examining themselves and changing practices, but does McGregor feel structural racism is a problem in dance?
“Definitely. It happens a lot in majorballet companies in the ways in which they cast, giving opportunities to certain dancers over others. I think it’s really important that the conversation is had and people are aware of it. I’m not talking about the Royal Ballet here because we have worked really hard at this. There is an amazing diversity group now; we’re really developing how we’re casting, how we’re encouraging that pipeline into the company, how we inspire dancers early on.
“What’s really important now is that companies are facing better training and people are in dialogue. Dancers have so often not had a voice or a place to go to. Now they’re believing their voices can be heard and have an effect, and I love that. Part of this pandemic has allowed dancers to reflect and ask, what kind of a company do we want to be in?”
What he absolutely wants to see is greater diversity across the board. “Let’s look at the lens really widely. Of course we’ve got race, we’ve got class and we’ve also got neuro-diversity. Why are we not thinking about that? How do we make sure we see people with, for example, Down’s syndrome, performing and contributing to an open creative life? There’s a lot of work to be done. Each of us needs to take responsibility.”
But can dance really encompass diversity? Classical ballet, for instance, surely can’t allow for all body types?. “I wonder if we say ‘can’t’ because we’ve never seen it. Each body has its own physical archive and my job as a choreographer is to pull that out of you and find ways I can use and compose it. The more we see diverse body types on stage, the more people understand that dance as an expressive art form can have this wide range. It doesn’t have to be a narrow version of what a sylph is like. That’s interesting but it’s not the only way. I think it’s important, especially for classical ballet companies, to start to think about.”
So could he make a professional dancer of any of us, at whatever age, size, weight? “Definitely,” he says. But could he really teach a woman my age (almost his age) with no dance training to do the splits? He laughs. “I can’t do the splits, I’ve never been able to do the splits.”
That’s down to his height – 6ft 2in – and the long limbs, although the idea that the splits are a marker of proficiency takes us back to the narrow assumptions we often hold of what a dancer should look like and be able to do. “It’s those people you know are going to work hard that are going to be successful. The ones who are putting in the hours. The dedication needed to be a dancer is absolutely extraordinary. You go in every day. You do your class. You work eight hours physically. You do a show at night. You repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s grunt work, in a way.” Grunt work that he helps make look effortless, even sublime.
Wayne McGregor is the director of La Biennale di Venezia, 15th International Festival of Contemporary Dance: First Sense. Venice, 23 July to 1 August 2021