Alistair Spalding: Welcome to the Choreographer Conversations podcast, where we dive deep into the inspirations and creative processes of today’s most influential dance artists. I’m Sir Alistair Spalding, Co-Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Sadler’s Wells, London.  Recorded in front of a live audience and available to stream on Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage, each episode offers a unique glimpse into the minds of the choreographers shaping today’s dance landscape. You can find the captioned film version of the conversation on Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage and the transcript for each episode is available in the show notes.

In this episode, I am joined by muti-award winning British Choreographer and Director Wayne McGregor. Wayne’s career has intersected science, spectacle, art and technology and is driven by an insatiable curiosity about movement and its creative potential. We discuss his unique way of working and his experiments that have led him into collaborative dialogue with an array of artistic forms, scientific disciplines, and technological interventions. Enjoy!

Alistair Spalding: Welcome to this next edition of the Choreographer Conversations. This time we have fantastic guest, Wayne McGregor. Who’s an Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells. This is a chance for us to go a little bit deeper into your choreography,your life, and the work that you’ve made. So I always like to start these at the very beginning.- Way, way back.- Way, way back. You were born in Stockport in 1970. How did you come across dance as a thing to engage with at that time?

Wayne McGregor: Well, I think I often tell this story about John Travolta being a big inspiration to me, which is totally true. But I was reminded very recently by my mother that actually I first started dancing in English country dancing at school and that I used to love it. So, you know, we used to do it in the school hall. The seats were pushed back. And we would do English country dancing, maypole dancing.

Alistair Spalding: What, like once a week or every day?

Wayne McGregor: Not every day.[Laughing] I think probably about twice a week but it is interesting. It’s one of the first times you’ve had this amazing opportunity to work with another body,work in dialogue with somebody that you don’t necessarily know very well. Or that’s not necessarily your friend. And, yeah, so that’s actually my earliest memory of dancing.

Alistair Spalding: Yeah. It’s interesting because, you know, that’s in lots of cultures that’s the way that people are introduced to dance. And also men feel just as well dancing as well as women in that situation as well. So it’s quite a good introduction, isn’t it?

Wayne McGregor: I mean in a way,it doesn’t matter how you start, does it? What inspires you to get going, it doesn’t matter. I think once you’ve got the hook, how is it that then you are supported to do more of it. And explore different kinds of dancing. And I think I had that opportunity. You know, I loved English country dancing. I loved John Travolta. I decided I wanted to go to ballroom and Latin American and disco lessons. And I started them around the age of eight. I had a kind of a crazy,brilliant teacher who was super creative. Not very rule oriented. She was, kind of, very freeing. And I started like that and developed my passion. But I was supported, I was nurtured. I had someone to say, “Look, you’re doing a really good job. This is something that’s really interesting for you. Why don’t you do more of it?” And signpost me into other opportunities.

Alistair Spalding: Yeah great.So what was the next opportunity? Did you study at school? Dancing school?

Wayne McGregor: No, I didn’t, no. So at school,I did kind of very academic and the sciences. Very academic GCSEs and A levels. But all the time,I was very busy with clubs and things outside school, so I would do, you know, whatever that was. Choir, amateur dramatics. The whole range of things a hyperactive child would doing. Gymnastics, you know.[Laughing]

Alistair Spalding: You were hyperactive then?

Wayne McGregor: You can ask my parents, but I think probably would be the answer.
And doing multiple things at once, you know. So have a big slate of extracurricular activities which were around the arts because we weren’t doing that much in school.
And, you know, we didn’t have that much access to the arts in school. Although we did do school plays is probably the biggest thing that we did.

Alistair Spalding: Yeah, yeah. So then what happened? You actually ended up doing a dance degree?

Wayne McGregor: I did. I did. I was originally going around the country looking at drama degrees. And then I went to this incredible place called Bretton Hall which is in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Alistair Spalding: Yeah. A beautiful building.

Wayne McGregor: They had incredible courses in ceramics and music and dramatic presentation. And they were just starting a dance degree. So I did a dance degree with semiotics. And I did that for three years and then went to spend a little bit of time in New York to soak up all of that, kind of, like nineties brilliant experimentalism.

Alistair Spalding: Yeah. That was happening everywhere.

Wayne McGregor: I mean, New York at that point was the kind of the centre of modern dance. Paul Taylor, you know, Twyla Tharp, Lucinda Childs, Molissa Fenley, Merce Cunnigham, were all performing. Often outside and free in parks,or you could watch them.
I remember watching a concert of John Cage and Merce outside the Lincoln Center for free. You know, these incredible artists really having a dialogue and in communication with the city that they lived in and worked in. That was super inspiring.

Alistair Spalding: So you were soaking it up there, soaking up all those influences.

Wayne McGregor: And also seeing the range of technical styles that you could work in. Seeing the range of offerings of artists who had very special individual voices. And at that point in the States, everyone was a rule breaker. There was a sense in which nothing was off limits. You could see a Trisha Brown piece on the side of a skyscraper, walking up a wall. You could see work outside. There was kind of a really lucid and free ability to be able to see work in a range of contexts which I really, really loved. And there was a sense that individual makers, so choreographers, could start any time and make what they wanted to make. That they didn’t have to be necessarily in big repertory companies or big formal institutions that they could do something very individualistic on their own at any point. You didn’t really have any much money to do it but you could actually just do it and you should. You were encouraged to.

Alistair Spalding: So you came back and you did do that?

Wayne McGregor: I did, yeah. So I came back to London in the early nineties. And I didn’t know anybody in London. I kind of moved to London not knowing anyone. And I knew I wanted to choreograph but I also knew I needed to live in London. And I got a job basically as a dance animateur in East London. And it was one of the first times that the Arts Council London – London Arts Board in those days – had start this programme where they asked artists to work with local communities to develop kind of community engagement and work with a whole range of groups but empower through dance. So I would be doing, you know, tea dance on a Tuesday. I’d be working with early bilingual learners on a Wednesday. I’d be doing three school sessions. I had a little youth group. I did that almost for three years. And in return for that,I had access to this amazing gym which was in Wanstead Youth Centre. Almost the perfect size for Sadler’s Wells.16 meter square, beautiful gym that I could work in and that I could invite dancers to work in. And so I worked with some dancers in London and some dancers still in Yorkshire from college. And I made my first piece, in Resolution at The Place in 1992.

Alistair Spalding: Yeah. I think I saw it because I remember you dancing in it. Your first piece. And I thought, “Woah, this is very different and new.” And that was 30 years ago. Of course.

Wayne McGregor: I know. Thanks, Alistair. It’s actually 32 years ago.

Alistair Spalding: And we worked together then when I was at Queen Elizabeth’s. So, you did The Place. I won’t go through the whole chronology because in fact, there’s a lot of it. And I was at talk you were giving the other day and you were saying that in a way you’ve been making one work for all that time but in just different contexts, different situations, different collaborators but there’s been this artistic journey all the way through. Do you think that’s right?

Wayne McGregor: Well, I think it is right because I think you can’t make multiple works as yourself. I mean what you’re doing is you’re investing everything into a set of ideas at a particular time. And those decisions that you construct are aimed or constituted towards a performance. And the performance date doesn’t change. You have a premiere and that happens and you have tour dates. And then you’re carrying on and you have a choice of whether or not you want to go back into remake that work and look at it or carry on making new work. And I kind of thought very early on that what I wanted to do is think about my practice as a continuum. And these pieces are almost like markers in time. And they held a collection of decisions which were very much based on that time. The time in which it was made. But also the time that I was in my life. And that rather than trying to edit them or change them as I moved on that I would like to keep them as they are as something which, kind of, encapsulates a sense of a whole set of ideas at a particular period of time. And I really love that.
That’s one of the things I love about legacy in dance. So if you look at any repertory, whether or not that’s classical ballet or if that’s the repertory of Martha Graham, you know or whether that’s the history of the Judson Church. You get these amazing pieces which are so reflective of their time. And you interact with them that way. And when you know context and understand them that you can really grow from knowing about that. So I really love that the work has its own kind of authority because it’s kept in time at a certain place.

Alistair Spalding: It’s funny you should say that because, in fact, when I see your work I always think it’s set in the future somehow. That it’s not now actually. It’s in some other space and time that you are seeing happening.

Wayne McGregor: Yeah. I always find that very bewildering when people say that to me. I’ve just been working on this brilliant project with Margaret Atwood in Canada and, you know, Margaret Atwood is this incredible writer who writes speculative fiction.
But she’s also often talked about as a seer. Somebody who predicts the future.
But if you look at her research archive, it’s all about what’s happening now. It is totally present tense science. It’s present tense understanding of the world. It’s just that perhaps those things haven’t become part of the vernacular. And so I think that.
I don’t think about the future ever. I think about the things that are happening now.
And I’m interested, whether that be science or philosophy or music or other dance that’s actually just happening in the moment. And I think it’s my job as a contemporary choreographer just to explore that and interrogate that and play with that and see what comes out of interrogating that in some way.

Alistair Spalding: And so the other aspect of that of those moments is each different collaboration. And, of course, that’s been absolutely extraordinary in your time. So many people, you know,artists, musicians, scientists, everyone… Writers.
You feed off that as a way of working, don’t you? You sort of ,you know… And I just wanted to ask you before we talk about the process how do you come across people?
Because you, you know,there’s so many interesting people and you find them somehow in the world and then invite them into your world. Just tell me how that works.

Wayne McGregor: Well, I think we find each other. I’m not just the only one looking. So I think one thing I’d say is that some of my wonderful collaborators are people that have also gravitated towards the work that I’m doing and have said, “This is interesting. I’d like to work with you.” But I have a list, right? I have a fan list.
And I’ve never been frightened of phoning somebody up and just asking them. Whoever they were. I’ve always had that, kind of like, confidence to not worry about the no.

Alistair Spalding: So you just get their number and say, “Hi it’s…”

Wayne McGregor: Yeah.

Alistair Spalding: Tell me one story of that when someone…

Wayne McGregor: I’m not going to, no. Because I’d have to reveal my secret process of doing that. But I just think if you really love what someone does and you have a real passion and heart for it when you go to meet them and you talk about it they know that in some way you are immersed in their world. And then when you spend time with them they perhaps see a way in which they can immerse themselves in your world. And I think that’s the key to great collaboration is you have to spend the time.
I don’t mean spend the time on the project but just spend the time in the world of that artist. Or in the world of that scientist. And, for me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a scientist or an artist or a philosopher. It makes no difference because it’s just people, you know. I can have some incredible engagement with a cognitive neuroscientist but not all cognitive neuroscientists. Because the specificity of each of their work is as special and, you know, unique as every artist. And then sometimes I kind of gravitate to people for a particular time. Because I feel like I need a bump or a push in a different direction or I want to unlearn something that I think I’ve got into the habit of making. Or that I just want to experiment. I don’t worry about the thing having to be perfect or concrete or fixed. I like the challenge of not really knowing what I’m doing. And I like to be in a circumstance where I’m in a place of not really knowing.

Alistair Spalding: And that must be a bit scary for your collaborators though. Don’t some people want a little bit of certainty on their… Particularly like with musician, you know, with that sort of time-based… [Laughing]

Wayne McGregor: But it’s only dance. Do you know what I mean? In a way, you know? I mean, you know, what are the stakes? The stakes are that what you’re trying to do is go okay, you might take a contemporary classical composer who works in a very particular way but if you have an idea and an idea touches them and, you know, has some kind of resonance for them they fire up and find a way. And I think that there’s no one way to collaborate with someone. And I’ve learned that some collaborators I have to kind of move around the back to try and embrace them into the world. Some of them I have to be very direct and very blunt. Some we are a little bit tense to begin with. Some we’re tense by the end.
They’re not perfect fluid human relationships. But what I think we share is just an aspiration to do something different or an aspiration to make a change. Or an aspiration to do something that we’ve not done before. And however unpalatable that might be for others.
Sometimes the critics, you know,who don’t want to receive it in the spirit in which it’s made. That’s kind of fine. Because what you are doing is you’re on your own artistic kind of journey and hopefully one with integrity, right? You’re trying to go, “This really interests me. If this really interests me,I hope it will interest somebody else.”
But it’s not gonna interest everybody else. And that’s fine. And I guess the bottom line is that you have to have someone who’s open really in order to collaborate.
And you sense that before you even start the journey. Or that you find a way into opening you know, so I remember I worked with a brilliant artist called Edmund de Waal who’s also a brilliant writer. And I remember my first studio visit with him.
I went to his studio and, you know, Edmund’s very quiet and very reserved. Has a very kind of meditative practice. And the first thing he did to me, he said, “Have you ever held porcelain in your hand?” I was like “No, no, not porcelain.” So he hands me a lump of porcelain that I have in my hand. And he said, “Oh, just warm it up.”
And I don’t know if you’ve ever held porcelain in your hand but when you warm it up, it becomes incredibly silky and really pliable and it feels embodied in some way. The relationship with that material becomes physicalised. Now we have a boundary object, you know, Edmund and I. That boundary object is the feeling of working with material in a particular way. It’s a thing that we both share that we can then talk about.
So we talked about porcelain for a bit. For quite a long time. And then that naturally opens up into other kinds of conversations. So I think with collaborators and with people in general it’s just finding something that you can riff off. And then things start to inspire, right? And that’s what inspiration is.

Alistair Spalding: Yeah, fantastic story. So can we get into the rehearsal room now? Because I’ve watched you making work and it’s quite fascinating because it’s not a silent process, is it? [Laughing] You have this, kind of like, way of articulating almost through voice.

Wayne McGregor: But, you know, it’s not unique to me. I mean, I think what’s really interesting about this is I’ve noticed that some people have said that that’s kind of a strange thing. You’re kind of making these noises. But actually, if you think about sports coaching. Often sports coaches coach with a thing called sonification. You make a noise and it gives you the image of a shape and it helps you with your dynamic in tennis. Or it helps you with forming a shape in gymnastics.
So, we did a brilliant experiment with a range of cognitive neuroscientists where I made these strange sounds, sounds that I often make in the studio and asked for “normal” people to dance the sound. And it was really interesting that there was consensus from this whole group of people about what the shape of the sound was.
Apart from a few odd bods. Which are the ones which you want to hire actually. But anyway…[Laughing] So if I were to go, “Woah”. Everyone has a kind of physical embodied sense of “woah-ness”. You know? And that’s kind of a little bit more detailed than me saying blue to you because your blue and my blue doesn’t quite have the same relationship. So sculpting action through sound is a way in which we can communicate something of an embodied experience. And I’m really fascinated with that. So it’s not an affectation. It gets a result. And it gets a result because what you do is prime that space for the body to behave or to help the body behave in a particular way. So it’s a way of communicating actually. And not just physically but in sound.
Well, it’s an acoustic image. And, you see, the thing is when you use a textual image. So if I were to describe the same thing. One, it would take me a long time but it also gets in the way.
I also work with dancers from all different nationalities. And working with dancers that,you know, are thinking very, very differently. So it’s a very immediate thing. So I think when you ask me about the studio, I’m very physical in the studio. I’m very practical. We’re very close in the room. And so that body to body communication is really important. But one way that it is inspired is by this sonification.

Alistair Spalding: And you’re quite quick as well, aren’t you? You are really quick. Making work. There’s an urgency around it somehow.

Wayne McGregor: Well, I mean, I do even when I’m teaching. When I’m teaching young people. Live I haven’t done a lot of teaching in my life and when you go and teach a group of eight-year-olds who are ready for you. You know, it’s the most stressful thing. Because they’re ready for you.They don’t care who you are and they just want to have a good time in that hour.
And when you face them, you can spend time and sometimes you do that working on a technical approach but I have found that a way into creativity is one of speed.
To start with. It’s one of freedom. It’s knocking away all the preconceptions of what you think you’re gonna do. Just become embodied in that moment. Move. Just move. Kind of unmediatedly but with a bit of instruction. And then all of a sudden all of that nervousness just evaporates.
And, for me, my experience has been that whether that’s the Paris Opera or new dancers in the company or eight-year-olds, it’s the same. You know, and if you can kind of burst through that you can make some really amazing progress quickly.

Alistair Spalding: And can I ask you about the relationship between you as a dancer and what you are making? So I was talking to Michael Keegan Dolan about that and he said, because he works in a different way. He doesn’t tell people how to dance.
Or what to do it, it’s through a period of improvisation and…But in the end, I said to him, “Actually, they look like you dance.” You know, that there is always this sort of sense that it comes from you. Your body. And then goes…Not that you’re teaching that to people. But the end result somehow comes from your physicality. Do you think that’s true?

Wayne McGregor: Well, I think you can’t deny what your sense system does. So I’ve got this incredible… We have all got these incredible bodies that are sensing and experiencing the world through the surface of skin,through vision, through hearing. And we are layering up a whole archive of experiences through the body all the time.
And we’re doing that in relationship to objects in the world. We’re doing it in relationship to other people in the world. So you can’t help but have your own biases therefore, in terms of your experience. And so when you are working in the studio in some way, you are reflecting back some of those biases. You can’t help it.
But also you’re looking at the differences. So the differences to you, which takes you somewhere else. So I think that iterative process gets you sameness in difference. And that’s really exciting, you know.
And I think, you know, one of the reasons I love to work with dancers who’ve got really incredible kind of like creative intelligence that they’re actually willing to improvise and willing to bring their own physical archive to the table is that they’re not trying to become you but they’re trying to understand something about your mindset, right?
The way in which you think about the world. We’re all looking at the world through particular lenses. So that’s why I always love reading reviews. I read all reviews.
And, of course, all reviews are in some way right. Because they’re right for the person that wrote them. But the central thing about a review is it is mostly a reflection of how you see the world and what you feel is important about the world. Or in this case, what you think is important about a dance. And that’s really interesting to me because actually we realise very quickly that we’re all conditioned by systems of watching or experiencing. And it’s quite hard to move out of them.
I think one of the great things that artists do is find deliberate provocations to take them out of themselves.To look at the world through different lenses. And that’s how you get that kind of conversational approach the way in which you think about the world. And I really respect that about artists and that’s why I love going to watch performance art or that’s why I love going to galleries because that’s what they’re doing all of the time.

Alistair Spalding: So you take your way of working and then you go into quite different situations sometimes. So, for example,we go into ballet, right? So you go into the ballet world and you’ve done that very successfully. But that is a very different set of minds in the room. You’ll probably disagree. But, I mean, there is a training and there is a way of, you know, that you are supposed to move. It’s very formed, you know, through the ballet form.

Wayne McGregor: But, you know, I think when you say that, when you say that that, I think, is an indication of how people see ballet. So that has an audience’s view or a critic’s view of what ballet is. When you are a ballet dancer, that is not how you see ballet. And so I think the only differences are a difference of culture. And what I mean is the culture of the organisations.
So when you are working in a large scale opera house situation you are working with dancers who are doing many other projects at the same time. You see them only for an hour. You have to work with them quickly. Your compositional language has to be organised at a time when you… You know, the actual culture of making in that environment is very different from a laboratory environment when you are able to work with the same dancers for many, many, many hours for many, many, many weeks.
All I’m saying about that is the cultural aspect of that is that ballet dancers then are primed to be expert at that kind of way of working. And so they’re super fast,quick to pick up. But haven’t had much time, loads of time to do deep improvisation. And so the embodiment of the work is a different process.
It’s almost like you teach the work and then they embody it. It’s not an embodied the experience that becomes the language. And so one is in out and one is out in. They’re both eventually inside out. You know, but the way in which you get to them is different.
But actually as creative artists I never worry about whether it’s a ballet dancer or a hip hop dancer or a Bharatanatyam dancer or a person who’s never danced before, an actor in a movie. But actually what you’re dealing with is that body and what that system understands. And how can I interface and interact with it. And so I find it quite easy to work with anybody. And find a way of generating language with them. Because we’re doing it together.
I’m not giving you a suit of clothes that doesn’t fit you. I’m going, you know, again,I’m offering a proposition. And then between us we find something connected. And that connection takes us somewhere. And that’s been one of the greatest pleasures of working in ballet companies. Because it was so much more unfamiliar, that language, the language that I danced.
But that with their expertise and with their intelligence and with their openness one has been able to invent something together.
So, again, it’s always very bizarre to me when there’s an idea that I have gone in there and given a language to them, which is alien to them because it also came from them. This is a collaborative thing that we’ve done together.
So if you think about the history of some of those incredible collaborators I’ve had with ballet dancers over the years a lot of that material has been co-authored with them in the same way that these incredible dancers I’ve got here in the company, we co-author that work together. And that’s the best version of dancing for me.

Alistair Spalding: But you just have shorter time to do it because of this system. You build strategies, right? You’re quick anyway, so…

Wayne McGregor: But also it’s a different thing because, you know, I’ve had the company for 32 years because it is a laboratory. You can test. Like I’m working on a composition I can do 10 iterations of the same composition over and over and over again until I find an ideal one.
If I’m working in a major ballet company, I’ve probably got two chances. But all of the practice that I’ve had in the laboratory bears fruit for those other contexts. So that’s why for me is very connected as a way of making dance. Because you are testing yourself in different environments and can use those skills when you need a shorthand or when you need to go deep and you can move between them.
And now for example,The Royal [Ballet]. Because I’ve been at The Royal [Ballet] quite a while, lots of those dancers have changed and developed and grown and become much more comfortable with improvisation and working more somatically and working with less kind of spacio-praxic, kind of, like instructions or harder defined language.
You know, there’s been a less of a need for them to have somebody at the front showing them what to do which means it opens up that whole organisation to work with different kinds of choreographers because all of a sudden now that language is a little bit more swift.

Alistair Spalding: Exactly. And they have done. And, of course, that’s a virtuous circle because they then they have these different experiences with different people. Different methods of working and stuff. So you basically like Random and now Studio Wayne McGregor

Wayne McGregor: I still call it Random.

Alistair Spalding: So do I. So that’s where you really have a chance to develop ideas a little bit more in terms of where you’re going. And then it feeds back into the other work. So, also, you work in all sorts of different areas including film, television, we’ll talk about ABBA later but you know, what is that like?

Wayne McGregor: Did you dance at ABBA?

Alistair Spalding: I did.

Wayne McGregor: Just checking.

Alistair Spalding: A little bit.

Wayne McGregor: [Laughing]- Enough.

Alistair Spalding: So are you learning anything in those situations or is it just, you know, you have a chance to earn some money and…

Wayne McGregor: No, I mean, no. I mean, so if I think about some of the really high-end tech that I’ve been able to work with over the years. So the very first time I started to work with motion capture which is a system that takes maths out of your body. You’ve seen, you know, Andy Serkis in his motion capture suit, was in the early Harry Potter movies that I was working on.
You had access to this incredible tech. You learn how to work with it and then, you know, when you are doing your cheaper version of a project, because you’ve not got those resources, what you really need or don’t need. And that motion capture learning all over the years that I’ve done motion capture was phenomenally helpful for when we did the other projects. So you intimately understand it. That’s one thing. Also on a personal level,you know, for example, if I’m working with Saoirse Ronan, who is amazing, you know Oscar-nominated actress, under 30. Incredible actress. When you’re working with her in the studio, priming her for a role. If that’s, you know, something we might do together. She’s also teaching you so much about how to communicate certain ideas through body, how she would respond. You know, that is a kind of an incredible process itself.
So I think all of those other projects are the same to me. It’s part of one network of activity that all interrelate. I don’t want to be bored doing the same thing over and over again. I think it’s really important to keep your mind really agile. And to be agile, you have to be challenged.
I like, often in those projects you’re working with very brilliant directors who are very demanding. Who are asking for a specific thing. You need to deliver a specific thing. Whereas normally I can deliver the thing that I want to deliver. So you’re doing that and you’re often working at scale so you are often working with like hundreds or thousands of people. And if you’re working on a big movie with like hundreds, thousands of extras how do you communicate? How do you work with that? And I think all of these opportunities really feed your ability to be able to choreograph but also to recalibrate what is choreography? What is a dance? You know, for me a dance is not just something that goes on the stage. It’s not not even about putting it into a different location. It’s about how do we organise our body in different situations. And that is something that I think that range of work that I really love to do.

Alistair Spalding: So let’s talk about ABBA. So I don’t’ know if people realise but you were really involved in that project. And anyone who’s seen it, will see why there was so much detail in every aspect of it. And they approached you to work with the original ABBA. But just tell me the process because I know a little bit about what happened.

Wayne McGregor: Well, I mean, I think the process is that ABBA hadn’t been together for 40 years and they were working out what could a concert experience be with avatars that ABBA would be in. But one of the things that we wanted to do is first of all help ABBA get back into their bodies for performing.
So we could recapture them and recapture them with that motion capture system that I talked about earlier. And honestly, nobody looks good in a motion capture suit, right? So you have to work on how do you get that back but our bodies change, right? So our bodies are very different now to they were 40 years ago.
So then I worked with some amazing body doubles and I basically made all of the concert with body doubles. Every single movement, every action, every facial gesture every lip sync, the whole thing. And we motion captured that and we blended the maths together to build these avatars. And then the avatars went through a thousand animators. Three years of development looking at the motion of each of those. But all of that, that technical side wasn’t really the purpose of the concert.
The purpose of that concert is to test and see whether or not pure light, because that’s what it is. It’s just light. Can be or have an empathetic relationship with an audience. When you are watching it,do you feel empathy with those avatars. And you absolutely do. And I think what’s so amazing about this project it allows us to see the potential of performance in a digital domain where you do have a human emotional connection with it. That it’s not just a technical experience but it really is a heartfelt, emotional one. And I think that’s really important. It’s important for the future of performance.
I’m not saying it’ll ever replace live performance because it won’t. But there’s a really interesting parallel about that. But also it speaks to me about what is possible for avatars and AI that would allow you to work in a social setting with those. So rather than having a robot as a companion for an older person would it be interesting to have an empathetic system that actually, in some way, you’re able to interact with in an interesting dialogue and a genuine dialogue. Where you really have feeling and there’s real feeling there and I think it does upend what do we mean by emotion and what do we mean by feeling.
You know, many of the audience who go to ABBA think they are really there. And what’s really strange on the first night,the older ABBAs come on stage you think, “Oh,that’s the older ABBAs.” And then on the very, very first night the real ABBA came on. So there was digital ABBAs, older ABBAs and real older ABBAS. And you can see the audience go, “This is so meta. What is going on?” But it speaks to how we receive physicality and humanness. And it speaks to how we might be able to harness, in a good way, some of the capabilities of technology and AI for human good.
We know there are lots of difficult situations with AI but we can’t lump it all together. And I think we need to get more… We’ll have more specificity and more detail about what we’re talking about when we’re talking about AI. Rather than just a kind of generalised sense.
Like I read a few of the reviews for Autobiography where I have an AI in it. And it was quite interesting. They were saying, “Oh, well McGregor is not choreographing now, the AI is doing it.” [Laughing] And again, this is about this prejudice about what you think AI is, right?
And actually, because for me what you need first is the human touch. So with our AI system,you have to move first. You move and offer the AI system something. The AI system then generates something back. And then you reembody it. It’s not devoid of the human presence. The human presence is essential and primary to the dialogue in the same way that if I was writing and I might search the internet and I have a little bit of information from the AI search. And I might take that back and it might strike a thought and then I do something with it when I’m writing or carrying on.
I think it’s just everyone having an opportunity to really be more sophisticated about what the dialogue is in AI rather than going, “Oh AI, it’s a problem.” And that’s what I’m passionate about finding a way of helping, kind of communicating that and finding whether or not AI can be a really essential creative tool. Not to replace the job of composition or choreography but to extend it or work in parallel with it. And I I love that as an idea.

Alistair Spalding: Well this is just reflective of your view of the future though, isn’t it? Because you’re optimistic about the future. And I think that comes over. You know, I know you were saying you weren’t sure that you‘re always making something in the future but you have this sense hat things are gonna be better because of it rather than worse. I would say. That it’s gonna be…It is gonna improve. And do you think that’s true?

Wayne McGregor: Well, I think you have to be in the conversation for it to improve. I think if you are outside of the conversation looking in just bemoaning it, it will never improve. So I think that’s why it’s essential that artists are in constant dialogue with politicians or with politics or with philosophers. I think it’s really important that dance is central to the conversation about how we want to live. And I think so often we have been on the outside of those conversations and we are seen you know, we are seen not to have value or contribution to that. So I think if you are working with an AI system or working with people who are developing AI you can have an ethical conversation about where some of the directions are going. You might be invited into a conversation more widely about what is the future of AI. How should it be regulated? What should we do with our own motion signatures? What should we do with our own body data? Those seem to me to be central to those conversations. But we’re not usually in them. So I think the optimism comes from a way of just going, “I’d love to be in the dialogue with you.”
And encourage more people to be in the dialogue. And then trust that, you know,in a human sense we can make better decisions. That collectively we can do some good.
Surely that is the purpose of art that it’s in some way a mirror to the world that we live in but also an absolute, you know, opportunity for us to do better. To change and to make a difference.

Alistair Spalding: So can we finish just to talk about your most recent work for the company, for Studio Wayne McGregor, the UniVerse: A Dark Crystals Odyssey. So how did that come about? I know you were a fan of the Jim Henson.

Wayne McGregor: Well I was kind of freaked out by that movie you know, in the eighties and I think I was, now on reflection I was freaked out by it because it was human interactions so it was humans working with puppets or animatronics but the human hand was made invisible. And you see these creatures doing these really, really strange things. But at the same time, at a really presentient message you know, this ecological message of a fractured earth trying to become one.
And I wanted to try and find a way of working with new technology with working with a different calibration of the body and this central ecological theme to do a kind of a poetic hopefully, you know, slippery kind of like fever dream. That’s what I wanted to make. Something that was kind of like… You couldn’t quite grab hold of. A deliberate attempt to make you feel something about climate change or climate change action without putting it into words and making it concrete. And so it’s a sensory feast rather than necessarily an intellectual feast.

Alistair Spalding: And technologically, what’s the innovation you would say? The main innovation around the work?

Wayne McGregor: Well I mean, I think one of the things that we wanted to do is how is it that you create a kind of digital environment which in some way floats like a hologram but it’s not a hologram. So how do you create context for the work which is a little bit more fragile and kind of ethereal. And I think then there was a whole range of development of work around costume, you know. Growing costumes. So some of those costumes are made with, you know, mushrooms or fabric. That have been, you know, designed through natural sources or experimented with like new fabrics or… You know, so that’s part of that. And the technology also in the body. What happens when you have a body in restraint. When it’s covered up.When it has lumps and bumps. And kind of a whole system of… A bit like I saw that amazing Merce piece years ago. I’ve forgotten what the name of it. With those bumpy costumes. Where all of a sudden, the morphology of the body is changing and you have to work harder at working out what that is. And whether or not you could still have a relationship with it because it wasn’t like your body. And so that whole aspiration for the technologically literate body is something that I’ve always been fascinated in.

Alistair Spalding: Well we’ve come to the end. I feel optimistic about the future as well now because I know that you are going to keep making great work. [Laughing] Both here and at The Royal Ballet and around the world. And thank you for opening up and sharing some of your incredible thoughts. Thank you, Wayne.

Wayne McGregor: Thanks, Alistair. Thanks so much.

[Applause]

Alistair Spalding: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Choreographer Conversations. If you enjoyed our discussion, be sure to listen to the rest of the series, as well as the captioned film versions available now on Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage.  Stay tuned — we’ll be releasing more inspiring conversations with leading choreographers in the coming months. Thank you.