Reality is a dance of events, writes Carlo Rovelli. And it’s to the celebrated physicist that our Biennale Danza director, Wayne McGregor, turns when presenting the 2026 programme, choosing the title Time Does Not Exist. We’ve written often and gladly about McGregor over the years: a sought-after choreographer known not only for his dance works but also for opera (La Scala, Royal Opera House), film collaborations (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire among them), sporting events and concerts, including Voyage, the unforgettable 2022 Abba avatar performance. He was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2010 for his artistic contributions, and more recently received a knighthood for services to dance. Detail-minded as ever, his programme highlights the many public workshops, artist talks, a Wiseman film retrospective, and the video installation drawn from the Venice Biennale’s Historical Archive, Life Lines. He recently published a book, We Are Movement (Bloomsbury Tonic), soon expected in Italian – striking for the depth of its thinking paired with plain, accessible language. It’s devoted to a sixth sense McGregor calls “proprioception”: the ability to perceive our movements in space without sight, through hidden receptors in muscles, joints, and the inner ear that feed constant information to the brain. The book offers a curious autobiographical note: McGregor traces the interest back to a knee dislocation suffered as a young dancer during a residency at the Alloy Studios in Pittsburgh. Reflecting on how illness and rehabilitation had reshaped his movements, muscles, and limbs sparked this new attention to the body – and with it, an invitation to revitalize it, to shake it free of acquired habits; after all, “dancing is a contract to change.”
With this mix of curiosity and rigour, McGregor approaches Biennale Danza’s twentieth anniversary with the theme Time Does Not Exist: a programme of artists able to unsettle linearity and inhabit past and present at once. We met him to follow the thread of his thinking on dance, the body, time, and what remains once the certainty of codes dissolves.

Heinrich von Kleist theorized in 1810 the “ideal dancer as a divine marionette,” and Craig developed the idea further with his “super-marionette.” Is there a relationship, at least on a historical and theoretical level, with the use of AI in contemporary dance?
Heinrich von Kleist and Edward Gordon Craig were already imagining the body beyond itself – an instrument of precision, liberated from ego. AI extends that lineage. It offers us a way to decentre authorship, to collaborate with systems that reframe intuition. Not a replacement for the dancer, but a provocation: what is agency, what is presence, when intelligence is distributed?

The programme of the Dance Reflections Festival by Van Cleef & Arpels has recently been presented in New York: there too, a wide spectrum of choreographies, historical revivals, educational projects, and young artists at their first experience. Can Venice claim any particular strengths in the international landscape of dance festivals?
Firstly, no single festival can encompass all the synergistic relationships that honour our extensive dance history or new work. There is just too much great work out there. I’m also glad Dance Reflections have been watching our past programmes and seeing the value in this interdisciplinarity!!! And anyway, Venice possesses a unique permeability. It fosters dialogue between past and future in a way few cities can – all thanks to the Biennale’s rich creative legacy. Unlike the more market-driven ecosystems of New York City, Venice encourages contemplation, slowness, and deep listening. Its strength is in contrast – heritage and experimentation coexisting without hierarchy.

In contemporary dance there is a tendency to place great value on the beauty of the idea and on the performer’s personal sacrifice throughout the working process, more than on the final result. The risk is that this undermines the audience’s critical engagement with the performance. What is your view on this?
Process is vital, but it is not the endpoint. The audience deserves an experience that is distilled, rigorous, and resonant. Beauty of the idea alone is insufficient – it must be embodied, transformed. Otherwise, we risk opacity. For me, the work must remain porous but also legible (not necessarily literal or story-driven), inviting the audience into an active, critical encounter.

The exposed body is often at the centre of contemporary Western culture – less so in the Arab or Jewish worlds –: identity, white, non-white, LGBTQ+, male, female… sometimes ethnic pride, sometimes political statement as in woke culture. In Indian or Japanese traditions, by contrast, the body expresses itself through very precise codes. The question is: does Western contemporary dance still possess shared codes through which to communicate with its audience?
Western contemporary dance no longer operates through fixed codes, and that is both its challenge and its power. It speaks through multiplicity, through fractured and hybrid languages. The body becomes a site of negotiation rather than certainty. Communication emerges not from shared vocabulary, but from shared attention – from how we choose to witness.

The theme of this edition is Time Does Not Exist: a title that echoes Carlo Rovelli’s thinking on time as an illusion of human perception rather than a physical reality. How did this choice come about, and how did it shape the selection of works? Did you begin with a body of pieces that responded to this vision of time, or did the theme itself emerge from the works?
Carlo Rovelli’s ideas resonate deeply with choreography, which already treats time as elastic, sculptural. The theme emerged dialogically – with the works, not before them. I was drawn to pieces that destabilise linearity, that stretch or compress duration, that invite us to experience time as relational, contingent, and embodied.

And next year? What are Wayne McGregor’s plans?
Continuation, always. Expanding the dialogue between choreography, science, and technology. I started an exciting new fellowship in Quantum at Oxford University. Deepening collaborations across disciplines. And returning, always, to the studio – to the body as an evolving archive of possibility.

Featured image: Wayne McGregor – Photo Andrea Avezzù – Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia