Review: Covent Garden chief takes leave from his day job

Wayne McGregor is resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet. He also choreographs for his own company.

Alastair Macaulay has been to see his latest show:

Company Wayne McGregor – an autobiography

Sadler’s Wells, March 12-13

Alastair Macaulay

A number of today’s leading choreographers are impressively dual-functional. Alexei Ratmansky, artist in residence at New York City Ballet, makes new ballets but is also in the front line of recreating historically informed versions of the nineteenth-century classics. Matthew Bourne has made a series of hit creations for his own company, New Adventures, while also working as a West End director-choreographer on “Mary Poppins”, “Oliver!” and other West End/Broadway shows. Christopher Wheeldon makes new ballets and is another director-choreographer, in his case with “MJ the Musical”(2022, Broadway, soon to open in London), about the life and music of Michaël Jackson. Akram Khan became a leading British contemporary dance choreographer while also performing as an eminent exponent of the classical Indian genre of Kathak (he has added a triple function by making ballets for ballet companies). Justin Peck, resident choreographer of New York City Ballet, also choreographs for Broadway (“Carousel”) and the movies (“West Side Story” and “Maestro”). Twyla Tharp, now in her eighties, has been working in modern dance, ballet, on Broadway, and more, since the 1970s: oh, and she writes books, too.

The British choreographer Wayne McGregor (b.1970) – who also works in film, music video, opera, and on largescale projects from “ABBA Voyage” to the 2023 Venice Biennale – has, since 2006, created, prolifically, as resident choreographer to the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, while also had, since 1992, running his own contemporary dance company. His has already been an amazing career, and yet, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of dance composition, an often dismaying one.

Rossini said that Wagner has beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours. I used to think he meant that wonderful brief incidents were interspersed with long acres of tedium, but now I think that he meant the nonstop bombardment of beautiful moments soon became ghastly. McGregor’s “autobiography” (new in 2017, currently having two performances at Sadler’s Wells) certainly has beautiful moments – like epiphanies of the future – but then they recur for much, much longer than mere quarter-hours until they beat you mercilessly into a mindless pulp. Lasting eighty minutes in a packed theatre, it soon feels like months of solitary confinement, like bright lights and loud sounds being applied to your eyes and ears until finally you admit that yes, neither truth nor beauty never existed in the first place.

The marvellous future that McGregor shows us, in “autobiography” and many other works, is one where differences of race and gender seem not just unimportant but illusory, where currents of motion pass through the body like mountain streams, where jumps and turns co-exist with tenderly mutual supportiveness, and where new music, design, and lighting all feel state-of-the-art. Women lift men, big men handle each other gently, and several women wear flesh-coloured chest-wraps that help to make them look remarkably like the several bare-chested men. The ten dancers are Company Wayne McGregor; McGregor’s “autobiography” opens with lunges and ripples of the upper body that surely derive from break dance, but soon moves upmarket with loads of high-energy ballet steps – pirouettes in attitude, grands jetés, pas de chat (big time), sustained relevés.

So why does even a few minutes of this dreamy and large-minded Utopia soon seem so nightmarish? Well, “autobiography” really does use bright lights and loud noises. Lighting is by Lucy Carter, the taped music is by Jlin . But the central McGregor problem lies in phrasing, or the lack of it. To the best choreographers, every component of a dance phrase is as vital as commas and prepositions are to good writers. To McGregor, in “autobiography” and several (not all) other works, phrases go “Blah blah, pas de chat, blah blah, grand battement, blah blah” – the “blah blahs” are just runs and walks, letting us know which steps are the McGregor effects.

And no effect in “autobiography” is small. When a leg is raised, it goes above the hip. (Often it moves into hypertension, passing the 180-degree split with various twists of pelvis and body.) When a pas de chat (a sideways jump in which the knees are raised, with the feet briefly passing each other in mid-air) happens, it’s high and big. In prose, a McGregor sentence would go “You know, gazillion, I mean, sensational, kinda, life-changing, yeah, literally, immolate, of course, talk about deconstruction, wow, always.”

After the phrase, the dancers hang around collecting themselves like athletes after jumps and sprints. What price Utopia? Such old-fashioned values as elegant posture and precise placement are irrelevant here.

Amid all this are human-scale scenes, often in duets, with one dancer planting a kiss on another’s head or carrying another in his arms. But these seem (literally, you know, I mean) deconstructed: they don’t register seriously because they come out of nowhere – and they lead nowhere. I want to believe in them, but they’re too isolated and too showy: they’re just other McGregor effects.

McGregor invariably thinks epic when it comes to design. In “autobiography”, vast three-dimensional apparatus – set by Ben Cullen Williams – is suspended above the stage; is lowered halfway; is brought down to the floor; is raised again. “autobiography” has several sections, in some of which the stage is subdivided into left (eight dancers doing something but what?) and right (two men interfacing and taking turns to do things to each other), each half impressively differentiated by Carter’s lighting.

I note that Nick Rothwell is credited with the “Autobiography Algorithm” and that the show is subtitled “(v95 and v96)”. Vv 97-106 are probably being performed between the rings of Saturn right now. It’s all mightily impressive and depressingly empty.