My ideal audience is open-minded and can let art flow through, receive meaning and let it grow

Descartes once said that body and soul interact harmoniously, breaking away from Platonic ideals of the body as a prison. Neuroscience then confirmed the body’s primary role in the way we know the world, our emotions, our feelings, and the way we build our identity.
In this direction, or shall I say in this exploration, Wayne McGregor researches body technology and how the body can communicate ideas to any audience. Nominated director of the Venice Dance Biennale in 2021 and recently reconfirmed for 2025/26 by the new Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, McGregor is a well-respected choreographer not only in the world of dance, but also in visual art, cinema, theatre, opera, and large concerts. This year, he dedicated the Dance Biennale to Myth Makers. “In modern society, with rapid technological progress and global challenges such as climate change and social inequality, we urgently need mythologies that resonate with the actual human experience”.
Wayne McGregor takes his role as Dance Biennale director seriously: he’s not happy with merely collecting what exists in the international scene, he invites choreographers to take a challenge, to be artists, to create modern myths. Those artists will take it upon themselves to continue “extraordinary creative acts from the past: Nubian pyramids, ancient cave paintings in Azerbaijan, Iranian mosaics, classical texts, music, sculpture, poetry, performative rituals, dance, songs that keep on harassing, inspiring, stimulating, challenging, and shaking us”.
Weren’t Greek tragedies all about this, too? We are so pleased to meet Wayne McGregor again and to further discuss his vision.

What do you think of the current funding systems for dance in Europe, and how they impact the careers of emerging choreographers?
One of the things I would say is that it’s really important for large-scale lyric, opera, and dance houses to remember is that it’s all thanks to their hero choreographers who make them lots of money now to be able to fund those huge shows that you’re talking about. We’re all kind of independent makers with no money early on who got investment early and were able to develop their work to be able to work in opera houses. So, I think about my own career, and I remember that when I started, I had no experience in ballet, but I had a group of really amazing presenters, contemporary dance presenters who supported me and commissioned, gave me money to work on ideas and experiment. Over time, that commitment allowed me then to work in the big opera houses. I think it’s important for those big institutions to remember what the talent pipeline is. So even if it becomes legislation that that happens, they need to do something about that recursive system. So, I’d say that they have to be mindful of that. But the call to action plays down to this: where is the noise about all of this reduction in funding? about these changes in the funding system? About arts being suppressed, certainly in the UK? You know, 80% of the GCSE dance that used to be on offer has been removed from schools, so nobody is doing this, but where is the noise? There’s not much noise and I think what we have to try and do all of us – whichever area of this amazing art form we’re working in, whether you’re a writer or you’re a choreographer or a dancer – is to make as much noise as possible to advocate for better change to keep going, we have to keep fighting. We can’t just accept it. It’s very challenging and it’s often very depressing, but we still have to keep fighting.
We want to hear La Scala on this subject, we want to hear the Opera House on this subject. It’s not enough that they’re OK, it’s really important that they think about the whole ecology and I think that’s one of the things that is really good here is that we’re allowed to think about the whole ecology in a holistic way and actually resource it.
What’s the option? The only option is forward. That’s the only option, but forward with energy and with passion to get the stakeholders to make a difference. Say that it’s not going to work. You know, you look at Trump now being the chairman of the Kennedy Center in America and controlling what work is at the Kennedy Centre: artists have congregated and are now stopping showing their work there. We do have soft power, and we need to keep using it. That’s in the UK, too. I see what’s happening in the States and some of those policies creeping into the UK. I see similarities and it’s really, really worrying. The Arts Council in the UK were supposed to be doing the new spending round, namely, who would get money over the next five years. It was supposed to happen in the summer. They’ve postponed it for a year and a half and frozen everybody. What that means is that any young choreographer who didn’t get a grant six years ago is now in a situation where they can’t even get a proper grant for seven years. That’s a whole artistic life, seven years. It’s a long time. This kind of risk-averse policy is not going to serve the arts well. I think those who have a place to have a voice need to voice it more strongly.

In your choreographies, to what extent do you draw inspiration from classical dance, modern dance, or even pop elements like Grease?
That’s interesting because I don’t ever separate them out. I know, you know, I loved Grease and Saturday Night Fever and disco. When I was young, I had ballroom Latin American and disco lessons for like nine years. That’s how I started. When I do a rhythmic thing in any contemporary company or a classical company, it might be based on a rumba, or it might be based on a kind of a disco riff, you know? I think you can’t separate the physical intelligence that makes up you in the same way that you can’t take your physical experience that you’ve had and separate it out into individual things. It just is you. And that’s the beautiful thing about having your own physical signature, obviously because I’m a very experienced choreographer I can also play the instrument of the body, right? So, I can start with a classical dancer in a classical vocabulary until I really feel that they feel secure and then move them out of it. I wouldn’t probably start with a contemporary first. I’d find a way to get there. Others, I would start immediately with some weird material. Others I’d find a softer way in. That’s what great technique is. You can spice your cooking in any way that you want. You find a way of making that thing essentially yours.

Quite often you close your eyes. Why?
Well, that’s actually a really interesting question because I think a lot of our sensing system is visual. We take a lot of visual information and process it and we receive the world most often through vision. It’s supported by other senses, but vision is a primary one. When I move between a real-life space and an imaginative space, I quite like to close my eyes to have an interior imaginative space, an image that might be different from this one. I can look at that window, but I can imagine a green field. When I imagine the green field and I close my eyes, I really see the green field. The window goes into relief. It’s a way of controlling images in real time. The other thing I’d say is when you close your eyes you activate another one of your senses, right? By depriving one you give attention to another, and that’s actually a really interesting gift in the rehearsal. When I’m stuck on what to do next, if you prioritise a different sense, suddenly you enter a new state of flow. That’s, again, one of the wonderful things about dance. You can move through playing with your senses. Sometimes I watch technical rehearsals like this: I turned off the sonic input and really concentrated only on the visual sense. I play the senses that way.

You once said you use dance to tell stories. I wonder if you ever tested your public about how they interpret your stories.
There are some great things in there that really interest me. The first thing is that often when we think about stories, we think about our real-life experience as if we’re in a state of understanding all the time, when actually, our consciousness works on a flatline and emotions emerge in the day so, the space between what we know and understand is far less than the things that we just don’t understand. That is important when thinking about storytelling because you know, we’re often expected in dance to tell a linear story that unfolds in real time and is absolutely, explicitly understood at every step of the way. But that’s not how we live our lives in our own head! We’ve got multiple voices, anyway. The question is: what do you want your audience to receive or understand about a narrative or a story? And I think for me, the way dance works is it provokes you to feel sensation and the sensation generates meaning. It’s not the other way around. You feel something tingling, your chemistry changes, and it gives you the feeling of an emotion that you’ve experienced before, right? Given that, I think one thing I’m interested in doing in the next few years is working with quantum computing to sense what is happening in the audience when they sense work and to see if you can use that data to construct the composition of the work. What is the relationship between the audience sensing and the story that you’re telling? And how can you narrow that gap? That’s a big interest of mine at the moment. Otherwise, I just trust that the audience will do the work that allows meaning to unfold for themselves. Some audiences will never do that because they want to be told a story. I understand that I can’t change that. That’s their bias. I understand that and I respect it, but the best audiences for me are those that go in there so open that they are able to receive and allow meaning to emerge. For me, that is the most wonderful thing about dance. And if I were to pick my ideal audience, that’s what I would want.

You always planned beautiful Biennales, and the coming Biennale promises to be even better. What new things will we see?
What’s important to remember is that the festival happens only for three weeks a year. I don’t programme a whole year’s worth of shows. The things that are available for a festival that are happening in three weeks are not the whole of the dance world, right? They are very specific things, so already that’s a curatorial restriction. But because I’ve been here, and because people started to understand the kinds of things that I’m trying to do, a lot of artists share work with me directly. They tell me: this is coming up, this is coming down the line, which means I have a much longer runway. I’ve been here for four years and can see and work with the artists that plan projects that are five years out, things that I wasn’t able to bring in the past but now I can to bring together, and so that longitudinal vision is really, really helpful in terms of what’s new. My passion has always been to find the artists that really have something extraordinary to say right now, either in the way they make it or the meaning of the work that they make, or the processes that they choose, and so in a way, it’s not incumbent for me to be new. It’s for me to reflect the newness of what happens in the world of dance and it’s a great, great pleasure to do that.

If you were an animal, what would you be?
I’ve got a probably surprising answer. Part of me is like a jaguar: fast, kind of impatient, kind of travelling great distances. Part of me is that, but part of me is a sloth, because I really value slow watching, I really do. I think that dance benefits from slow watching, repeat viewing and slow watching, not just watching something, writing about it and then it’s over, you don’t see it anymore. I think all our experience benefits from slow watching. I would be a combination of those two.

Featured image: Wayne McGregor © Pål Hansen