Wayne McGregor was born in Stockport and is a leading British choreographer. His work is a fusion of arts, digital film, music and architecture. He is director of Sadler’s Wells’s first resident contemporary dance company– Studio Wayne McGregor – and a resident choreographer with the Royal Ballet. He has also explored the link between dance and neurology; in 2004, he became a research fellow at Cambridge’s department of experimental psychology. He is the most supple of multitaskers, including choreography in films such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. During May and June, his company will perform in Blackpool, Liverpool, Leicester and Birmingham.
1 | Radio
This is an amazing new independent radio station based in Hackney, east London, that does wonderful documentaries and talks. I did an interview with them as part of their great series, Beginning and Middle, which was how I found out about them. What amazed me was that I was asked questions I’d never been asked before. And the way they cut the interview together was extraordinary: they build an acoustic world that embodies someone’s essence. I have listened to lots of their interviews – they are rather like radio drama. You don’t just hear voice and words, they create a sensory, subliminal environment. I chose music from the beginning and middle of my life. Growing up in Manchester, Boy George and Culture Club were in there.
2 | Music
Jlin is from Gary, Indiana. Her music is “footwork” that comes out of gangs and battles in Chicago – it describes the city’s racial and economic inequalities. Not many people have heard of it yet but it is starting to get a global following and is unlike anything else. I’m looking forward to going to a concert of hers at Oslo in Hackney. She is super young. Her album, Dark Energy, was Wire’s top album last year: a frenetic, raucous, futuristic sound. She does incredible stuff with rhythm. I love it so much, I am going to work with her next year. You hear something and it hits you in the stomach; it is quite rare and so exciting.
3 | Dance
This is an installation with lights, sounds and projection – and no physical body at all. It is a chance for lighting designers and sound artists to do their own work – choreography translated into other dimensions. One of the people working on it is Lucy Carter, who has lit all my pieces. I am intrigued to see what she will do. It is an experiment and extraordinary that it should happen in Sadler’s Wells, a building populated by dancers. Incidentally, I always find it curious in reviews how everything is compartmentalised: this is the lighting bit, this is the music bit, this is the choreography – productions do not work like this, it’s way more mobile and collaborative.
4 | Theatre
Cleansed at the National Theatre
I did the first production with Sarah Kane in the 1990s, directed by James Macdonald – I did the physical work. I know and love that play. I knew Sarah Kane and am so curious to see that extreme beauty and how it is going to translate in a new and different way. I have read reports of people leaving the theatre feeling nauseous. But I find her writing poetic as well as painful. The visual imagery and text combine to get to corners of the imagination the audience have not experienced before. She was hilarious – warm, open, collaborative. She was phenomenal.
5 | Book
This Brutal World by Peter Chadwick
I am just waiting for this book to come out. It is a curated collection about brutalist architecture – Mies van der Rohe and all the architects who made those incredible buildings. I was involved in restoring a Bauhaus house that belonged to the German choreographer Kurt Jooss. The house was built on the Dartington estate in the 1930s by William Lescaze, the modernist architect who built America’s first [international style] skyscraper. I am obsessed with architecture. I think choreography and architecture are the same: they are both about how bodies feel in space.
6 | Art
Conrad has a major new sculpture [outside the Crick Institute in King’s Cross] and the pictures of it make it look amazing. It is 14 metres tall and beautiful, a triumph of engineering. He is a Leonardo da Vinci-esque character. He is a maker. He takes pleasure in working out the maths – he has a brilliant brain – but then gets on and solders in his workshop. I love the way that everything is handmade and that he translates complex, ambitious and imaginative ideas into something accessible.
7 | Architecture
I am a massive fan of Zaha Hadid. She had a great sense of humour, passion and directness of vision. She was authoritarian and singular. Making great work isn’t democratic. You need drive. I watch her with a smile. You see her next to one of her incredible buildings that look as if they could only ever exist on paper. My favourite is the Heydar centre in Azerbaijan. It seems to have slid into the atmosphere. She was a total visionary. I did meet her. I was very affected by her death. Her work is extraordinary and yet she also died with so many unrealised ideas.
