When manic meets minimal
Debra Craine
Times 2
13 November 2006
Mr minimalist architect gets a job at the Opera House with the wild man of dance. So, what happens next?
With Wayne McGregor you never know where his insatiable curiosity will take him. When he choreographed Nemesis in 2002 he enlisted the services of the animatronic experts at Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop, who made giant prosthetic arms for his dancers. Ataxia (2004) was the result of six months spent working with neuroscientists at Cambridge University on the interface between mind and body. For Amu (2005), his fascinating collaboration with composer John Tavener, he teamed up with a heart imager and sent all his dancers to have their hearts scanned. This week, for his new Royal Ballet commission, McGregor turns to architecture.
You get the idea. McGregor is a dance-maker who likes to think outside the traditional box. His keen embrace of science and technology, of pop and cyber culture, has made him one of Britain’s top-ranked choreographers. He’s the shot in the arm for ballet companies seeking the next big thing.
So here he is back at the Opera House, home of the Royal Ballet, a company thirsty for new adventures. This isn’t his first creation here (Symbiont(s), Engram and Qualia were all made for the Royal), but it is his most ambitious. With a massive architectural set bigger than the Royal Opera’s new Carmen, and music by the White Stripes and Joby Talbot, Chroma looks like another eye-catching foray into “Wayne’s World”.
The dancers are certainly loving it. The four women in his cast — Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo, Sarah Lamb and Lauren Cuthbertson — have all been rehearsing the lead in The Sleeping Beauty at the same time as working on Chroma. As shifts of style go, it couldn’t be more extreme.
If classical ballet had anarchists, McGregor would be their leading spokesman. He makes dance that has a startling awareness of how “other” the body can be made to look. He’s fascinated with anatomical deconstruction, his language is one of hyper-articulations and constant kinetic energies, and he frequently uses his dancers like a “graphic alphabet”, rearranging them at ferocious speed.
Which makes his collaboration with the architect John Pawson all the more unexpected. Pawson is the exact opposite, a cool minimalist, a designer noted for his serene approach to the fundamentals of light and space. Yet, says McGregor, “I was captivated by the way in which John was able to construct a space that was spaceless in a way. I thought it would be a fantastic challenge to work with the notion of volume on stage, rather than a room.”
Pawson, who once appeared as an extra in The Sleeping Beauty with the Royal Ballet in Japan in the 1970s, had never designed for dance before, but when the invitation came to work at Covent Garden he knew immediately how to approach it.
“Wayne wanted something a bit different,” Pawson says. “He wanted people to dance through architecture. I wanted to keep it simple. I didn’t want to make it difficult or dangerous for the dancers. I wanted them to dance suspended in a void so that they could appear and disappear without you being aware of where they are coming from or what they are dancing on.”
Pawson’s white box set, which looks like a photographer’s studio, comprises 10m (33ft) high walls of stretched white fabric. Chroma’s ten dancers will be able to step in and out of the box, and into and out of Lucy Carter’s suggestive lighting.
So has Pawson’s soaring tranquillity calmed McGregor’s excitable creativity? “No, it’s had the opposite effect,” McGregor says. “One of the terrific things about the set is that it allows for an even more punctuated rhythmic contrast; it’s a fantastic opportunity.”
The score is by Joby Talbot, who earned his pop credentials working with the Divine Comedy. The starting point was his Hovercraft. “I was so taken with it, it’s so physical and visceral and so impactful on the body that I wanted to work with that,” McGregor says. “Then when I heard the White Stripes tracks, I thought they had a massive propensity for dance.”
Chroma’s score includes Talbot’s orchestrations of three songs by the White Stripes — Aluminum, Blue Orchid and The Hardest Button to Button — along with another three Talbot tracks (taken from his chillout album Once Around the Sun). “The three White Stripes tracks are like the black, the three from Once Around the Sun are the white, and they come together in a fusion of colour in Hovercraft at the end,” Talbot says. The music, to be played by the full Royal Opera House Orchestra, will — like a West End musical — be miked, something almost unheard of in an opera-house context. But Talbot has his reasons. “These places are built for opera and if you have a soprano trying to make herself heard then it’s quite a good thing that the orchestra is underneath the stage, in a different room in effect. But with dance I don’t want to feel that the orchestra is in a different room.
“It’s not about volume, we are not out to deafen anybody; it’s about the fact that the orchestra feels like it has a lid on it. What I want to achieve with the amplification is lifting the lid and bringing the orchestra into the room.”
Talbot is thrilled that Chroma is getting five performances at the Opera House. “It sounds like the most unbelievable luxury to me, because in classical music you’re grateful for just one.” But McGregor isn’t so happy that his ballet, which shares a bill with Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and another world premiere from Christopher Wheeldon, will be so limited.
“It takes a while for word to get out about this type of evening,” McGregor says. “Of course I would like it to have more performances, not least for the dancers, because with five they are only starting to get into the skin of the work. It’s a shame they won’t have the opportunity to be deeply, intimately, connected with it.”
Whatever happens, this collaboration will ignite further sparks in dance. Pawson’s contribution is so striking that other design commissions must surely follow; Talbot has already lined up something with the choreographer Carolyn Carlson for next year.
McGregor, meanwhile, is heading to America to be mentored by neuroscientists. He will spend almost five months at the University of California, San Diego, helping to build an artificially intelligent body informed by the kinetic processes of his extraordinary dance brain. This being McGregor, the experience will find its way into his next choreography for his own company, Random, due in 2008.
Debra Craine
Times 2
13 November 2006
Mr minimalist architect gets a job at the Opera House with the wild man of dance. So, what happens next?
With Wayne McGregor you never know where his insatiable curiosity will take him. When he choreographed Nemesis in 2002 he enlisted the services of the animatronic experts at Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop, who made giant prosthetic arms for his dancers. Ataxia (2004) was the result of six months spent working with neuroscientists at Cambridge University on the interface between mind and body. For Amu (2005), his fascinating collaboration with composer John Tavener, he teamed up with a heart imager and sent all his dancers to have their hearts scanned. This week, for his new Royal Ballet commission, McGregor turns to architecture.
You get the idea. McGregor is a dance-maker who likes to think outside the traditional box. His keen embrace of science and technology, of pop and cyber culture, has made him one of Britain’s top-ranked choreographers. He’s the shot in the arm for ballet companies seeking the next big thing.
So here he is back at the Opera House, home of the Royal Ballet, a company thirsty for new adventures. This isn’t his first creation here (Symbiont(s), Engram and Qualia were all made for the Royal), but it is his most ambitious. With a massive architectural set bigger than the Royal Opera’s new Carmen, and music by the White Stripes and Joby Talbot, Chroma looks like another eye-catching foray into “Wayne’s World”.
The dancers are certainly loving it. The four women in his cast — Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo, Sarah Lamb and Lauren Cuthbertson — have all been rehearsing the lead in The Sleeping Beauty at the same time as working on Chroma. As shifts of style go, it couldn’t be more extreme.
If classical ballet had anarchists, McGregor would be their leading spokesman. He makes dance that has a startling awareness of how “other” the body can be made to look. He’s fascinated with anatomical deconstruction, his language is one of hyper-articulations and constant kinetic energies, and he frequently uses his dancers like a “graphic alphabet”, rearranging them at ferocious speed.
Which makes his collaboration with the architect John Pawson all the more unexpected. Pawson is the exact opposite, a cool minimalist, a designer noted for his serene approach to the fundamentals of light and space. Yet, says McGregor, “I was captivated by the way in which John was able to construct a space that was spaceless in a way. I thought it would be a fantastic challenge to work with the notion of volume on stage, rather than a room.”
Pawson, who once appeared as an extra in The Sleeping Beauty with the Royal Ballet in Japan in the 1970s, had never designed for dance before, but when the invitation came to work at Covent Garden he knew immediately how to approach it.
“Wayne wanted something a bit different,” Pawson says. “He wanted people to dance through architecture. I wanted to keep it simple. I didn’t want to make it difficult or dangerous for the dancers. I wanted them to dance suspended in a void so that they could appear and disappear without you being aware of where they are coming from or what they are dancing on.”
Pawson’s white box set, which looks like a photographer’s studio, comprises 10m (33ft) high walls of stretched white fabric. Chroma’s ten dancers will be able to step in and out of the box, and into and out of Lucy Carter’s suggestive lighting.
So has Pawson’s soaring tranquillity calmed McGregor’s excitable creativity? “No, it’s had the opposite effect,” McGregor says. “One of the terrific things about the set is that it allows for an even more punctuated rhythmic contrast; it’s a fantastic opportunity.”
The score is by Joby Talbot, who earned his pop credentials working with the Divine Comedy. The starting point was his Hovercraft. “I was so taken with it, it’s so physical and visceral and so impactful on the body that I wanted to work with that,” McGregor says. “Then when I heard the White Stripes tracks, I thought they had a massive propensity for dance.”
Chroma’s score includes Talbot’s orchestrations of three songs by the White Stripes — Aluminum, Blue Orchid and The Hardest Button to Button — along with another three Talbot tracks (taken from his chillout album Once Around the Sun). “The three White Stripes tracks are like the black, the three from Once Around the Sun are the white, and they come together in a fusion of colour in Hovercraft at the end,” Talbot says. The music, to be played by the full Royal Opera House Orchestra, will — like a West End musical — be miked, something almost unheard of in an opera-house context. But Talbot has his reasons. “These places are built for opera and if you have a soprano trying to make herself heard then it’s quite a good thing that the orchestra is underneath the stage, in a different room in effect. But with dance I don’t want to feel that the orchestra is in a different room.
“It’s not about volume, we are not out to deafen anybody; it’s about the fact that the orchestra feels like it has a lid on it. What I want to achieve with the amplification is lifting the lid and bringing the orchestra into the room.”
Talbot is thrilled that Chroma is getting five performances at the Opera House. “It sounds like the most unbelievable luxury to me, because in classical music you’re grateful for just one.” But McGregor isn’t so happy that his ballet, which shares a bill with Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and another world premiere from Christopher Wheeldon, will be so limited.
“It takes a while for word to get out about this type of evening,” McGregor says. “Of course I would like it to have more performances, not least for the dancers, because with five they are only starting to get into the skin of the work. It’s a shame they won’t have the opportunity to be deeply, intimately, connected with it.”
Whatever happens, this collaboration will ignite further sparks in dance. Pawson’s contribution is so striking that other design commissions must surely follow; Talbot has already lined up something with the choreographer Carolyn Carlson for next year.
McGregor, meanwhile, is heading to America to be mentored by neuroscientists. He will spend almost five months at the University of California, San Diego, helping to build an artificially intelligent body informed by the kinetic processes of his extraordinary dance brain. This being McGregor, the experience will find its way into his next choreography for his own company, Random, due in 2008.