Wayne McGregor

Presenter0:00

This is the BBC.

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the choreographer Wayne MacGregor, resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet. He follows in the footsteps of Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan.

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Sort of. His dancers occupy the same rehearsal rooms and that iconic stage, but instead of re enacting a rich repertoire of classics, his creations are contemporary, challenging dancers and audiences alike to see their bodies and the world anew.

Presenter1:03

Like many lads born in Stockport in the seventies, he was mesmerized by the moves of John Travolta. But his fascination didn't fade at the doors of the local disco. He went on to study choreography first in Leeds and then New York. He formed his first company aged just twenty two.

Presenter1:20

He says My dances comment on my life. It's because they involve a series of questions I want to explore. I suppose when I've got no more questions, I will stop.

Presenter1:30

Um so what are the big questions that preoccupy you then, Wayne? What what is it that you're trying to fathom through the work that you do?

Wayne McGregor1:36

I think the questions are endless. I mean, I think I'm fascinated by the technology of the body. If you think about the body as the most technologically literate thing that we have in a world where technology is developing at a rate where we're going to experience our lives in really challenging and interesting ways, it just feels to me that the body is central to all those conversations. And you know, our bodies, we carry all our kind of personal archive in our bodies. So when I look at you, I already have a sense of something of your physical signature, of how you're feeling today, of what that might express to me. And so the bodies are so redolent with meaning.

Presenter2:08

What what how do how how do I read to you?

Wayne McGregor2:09

Well, I think you today you you're in a state of preparedness, you're ready for this interview, that you look quite relaxed, you know, very open-faced. You know, all these things are kind of physical signatures that communicate so much more than words. Actually, eighty percent of our physical language is in gesture and physical movement and not words. And in a way, choreography is all about that. It's about taking it and extending it in really interesting ways.

Presenter2:29

You once said fascinatingly you're interested in bodies misbehaving. Tell me more about that.

Wayne McGregor2:35

Well, I think in a way it it relates to this idea that technique is a codified language that people understand and that is is structured in a very particular way. And I think the potential of the body is so much kind of wider and greater than that. And I want to explore the the possibility, the potential of a body, rather than what the body already knows. Do you ever meet resonance?

Presenter2:51

Resistance from d

Wayne McGregor2:52

The

Presenter2:52

And so

Wayne McGregor2:52

Uh

Presenter2:52

Mr B. That is simply impossible.

Wayne McGregor2:52

Do we ever say that?

Wayne McGregor2:55

I don't know. Well, actually, you sometimes do, but you know, it's always interesting with dancers is you've got the dancer there that says that's impossible, and then the dancer next to them doing it. And so, you know, you just choose the ones that you're going to work with. I think one of the wonderful things about dance too is that because it's a collaborative art form, you're already getting energy and input from the body that stood in front of you. So you can even kind of give it a suggestion and it starts to tell you what to do. So when you get into that flow of making, it's very recursive, it's very iterative. So it's co-authoring rather than me telling and imprinting myself on them. And if you've got a room full of really extraordinary dancers who are in a state of readiness, you can't disappoint them. You're working with them to deliver something extraordinary together, but it really is a we, not I, endeavour.

Presenter3:38

Music, of course, has to occupy an essential part of your creative endeavours. Um do you listen to different music to relax than you listen to when you're trying to uh imagine?

Wayne McGregor3:48

I do listen to different. I mean, I've got very eclectic kind of musical tastes, if you like. But I think for me, it's really important that when I'm working with a piece of music, it has to kind of almost sit inside my body. I have to feel that it resonates and reverberates in my ribcage. And I have to feel compelled to want to work with it over and over again. So, if you think about a piece of music that I make for choreography, I might have to listen to it three, four hundred times. And so, it needs to have real value immediately. I have to just really love it. I have to fall in love with it, even if it's challenging.

Presenter4:18

Tell me about the first piece we're going to hear this morning.

Wayne McGregor4:20

So this is a composer, no, he's an incredible composer called Essa Pekasalinen, and this piece is called LA Variations. It's a huge kind of thrilling ride for full orchestra.

Presenter5:31

That was part of L A variations performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conducted by the composer, Essa Pecker Salaman. Wayne MacGregor, you were the first resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet not to have trained at the Royal Ballet. It was seen at the time to have been a bold appointment.

Wayne McGregor5:44

Yeah.

Presenter5:48

Cast your mind back a decade, with within those walls, those hallowed walls, what sort of reception were you given when you first arrived?

Wayne McGregor5:55

Well I think within the company I was given an amazing reception. You know, I found a company that was really hungry for new kind of creative challenges. I found a kind of a a production organization of people who help you realize the things for the stage like sonography, really excited to try new ideas. And I fi found the majority of the audience really um open to a different way of expression.

Presenter6:15

Your collaborative approach, your intellectual curiosity, is something that marks out your process, I think.

Presenter6:22

It seems to know no bounds. In 2005, you decided to go and watch some open heart surgery. Why did you?

Wayne McGregor6:29

Well I was making a piece about the the heart and I wanted to work with the heart surgeon to to actually build a better kind of knowledge about it so he thought it would be really great for me to go to open heart surgery and I had a quite an embarrassing experience in there in that I fainted during it. I'd imagined that I was going to be behind the screen, you know, looking in through the window and actually I was scrubbed up and in the operating theatre and one of the things I hadn't expected was not I'm not at all squeamish. I'd expected the blood and the rib cage opening. I hadn't expected the smell of the cauterization. I think that kind of took me totally unawares. So I ended up on my back with my legs in the air and the surgeon coming to make sure I was alright.

Presenter7:07

Not exactly a balletic position to have.

Wayne McGregor7:08

It wasn't my finest moment.

Presenter7:11

How did that affect your choreography then when you decided to input it?

Wayne McGregor7:14

Well, I think, you know, what was amazing about it is, first of all, seeing the dexterity of a surgeon in that environment. He was operating to music, Bach in fact, which was really interesting. And so he'd actually charged that operating environment with a kind of another sense of consciousness, if you like, which I thought was really beautiful and really poetic. And then you see the body, you actually see the materiality of the body. So I think what I try to do all the time when I'm working on new pieces is to really delve into kind of the detail of work, to just prime my imagination in a different way, and hopefully the collaborator's imagination in a different way.

Presenter7:45

You talk about your life's work in such an involved, uh I mean, easily understandable, but it is very complex what you do. And here we are, a nation obsessed on BBC One prime time by watching Strictly come dancing. What do you make of Strictly? Do you watch? I do watch.

Wayne McGregor8:02

I think it's it's amazing strictly because what you see there are people who don't normally dance, having to go through a process where they have to put their body through kind of an ordeal in a way. They have to kind of activate and re-energize all of those things that they've lost in terms of their physical abilities that they had as they were children, and that they have to find a way then of coordinating themselves. And what I love about Strictly is that journey for those stars that are in there. Actually, you see them almost kind of dyspraxic, not able to move, you know, literally misbehaving. And over time, you see that body start to have rhythm and start to have flow. And I think that's really extraordinary. It's never too late to dance. And it's never too late to get back in touch with your body.

Presenter8:40

Let's listen to your second disc, Wayne McGregor. What are we going to hear?

Wayne McGregor8:43

So this is We Played Some Open Chords in Rejoiced by a group called A Winged Victory for the Sullen. And it's one of the most kind of open, beautiful, kind of emotional, heart rending pieces that I know.

Presenter9:52

That was we played some open chords and rejoiced by a winged victory for the Sullen. Wayne McGregor, as I mentioned, you were brought up in Stockport, but your parents are both Scottish. How did they find themselves on the on the outskirts of Manchester then?

Wayne McGregor10:02

Yeah.

Wayne McGregor10:05

I think, you know, my my parents met when they were super young, so my mum was seventeen and my dad was eighteen, so they'd been together fifty two years and I think had maybe a day apart in all of that time, which is quite remarkable. Um I I think, you know, they were they were both in th from a very working class background, um, were not happy in Scotland, I think were feeling very stifled. I think one day they kind of went home, burnt their furniture and moved to England and moved with very little money, but with a a kind of a a wish for a different kind of life.

Presenter10:34

No, that is a dramatic act.

Wayne McGregor10:35

It's a dramatic act, yeah, and it's a brave act, you know, and um I think they had the strength in one another. I think one of the wonderful things about my parents is that they have that kind of trust and compassion for one another that that allows them to do things that perhaps their generation wouldn't do. Um and i it's been a wonderful gift to see that and to experience it and to have it in my life.

Presenter10:44

Bah

Presenter10:58

And you were an only child, but they had they f they fostered many kids.

Wayne McGregor11:00

They did. They fostered children before I I was born and then afterwards. My mum had two um miscarriages, so I think they always wanted a a larger family. But I think that capacity for love, that capacity for joy and comfort and just confidence, giving you the confidence to try things, I think is really wonderful and it's something I really try and inspire in people who are being creative for the first time. Just give it a go. What is there to lose? Take the risk.

Presenter11:22

I think you would have been around about seven when Saturday Night Fever came out. A little bit older by the time Greece came out, but you definitely wouldn't have been allowed to see Saturday Night Fever. You might just have sneaked into Greece if you lied about your age. Um tell me about the impression that John Travolta made upon you when you saw him move and dance for the first time.

Wayne McGregor11:26

Yeah.

Wayne McGregor11:27

Yeah, yeah.

Wayne McGregor11:30

Yeah.

Wayne McGregor11:33

Yeah.

Wayne McGregor11:38

Well, just incredible. I mean, I heard the music first, because in my local dancing school, I had this amazing kind of ballroom and Latin American teacher, Marjorie Barlow, you know, the kind of archetypal ballroom dancer. She was, when I first started in her mid-70s, huge eyelashes, you know, really quite strict. But she would play these songs and we would dance to them. But she was quite unusual in that she hated competition. She didn't like the idea of competition at all. And even though I was pretty talented in ballroom and Latin American dance with my partner, Samantha, I wasn't allowed to do any competitions. So, as a kind of a compromise, she let me make up my own versions of the rumba or the cha-cha. And I realized actually those were my first touch points for choreography. What I was able to do was to make variations of something that was a heritage piece, so a cha-cha-cha, and use that to make something new. And then she would note it and let me do that and let me teach that. So I think that had a really kind of formative experience for me. But John Chavolta, watching eventually when I did see him, watching that pure physicality, the rawness of that body, the ease and effortlessness, the effect it had on everybody around, it just made me want to do it more. It really did. So more music.

Presenter12:42

McGregor, you're third.

Wayne McGregor12:43

I grew up in the seventies, as you know, and Jim Reeves was very big in the seventies, and my parents used to listen to this uh track a lot. Have I told you lately that I love you? When I hear this track, it makes me smile all the time. It reflects my parents' love for each other and the love that I had growing up at home.

Speaker 312:59

Have I told you lately that I love you?

Speaker 313:07

Could I tell you once again somehow?

Speaker 313:15

Have I told with all my heart and soul how I adore you? Well, darling.

Speaker 313:25

I'm telling you now.

Presenter13:29

Have I told you lately that I love you? That was Jim Reeves. Wayne McGregor, tell me when did you. I get the sense of you with Marjorie Barlow and doing the cha-cha-cha and reimagining it.

Wayne McGregor13:36

I think the

Presenter13:39

You were doing probably a little bit of dance in school as well at that time in the seventies?

Wayne McGregor13:43

Well, yeah, I mean, we were doing English country dancing and Maypole dancing uh very early on, you know, when I was four or five years old in primary school.

Presenter13:49

And so was it a point at which you thought, oh, this is my thing. I'm a hand in glove of this.

Wayne McGregor13:53

I loved it. I just really loved it. I just I just loved moving. I was a very physical child anyway, slightly hyperactive, did gymnastics, you know, lots of athletics, you know, swimming. Also at that point I was doing amateur dramatics, so I was doing lots and lots of musicals.

Presenter14:05

Much of uh your choreography enthusiastically embraces technology in the staging, in the subject matter. As a teenager, were you an early adopter? Were you somebody who had a Tari 800 or a B B C?

Wayne McGregor14:15

I was like, I'm not sure if I can do it.

Wayne McGregor14:17

Yeah, so well I remember my very first computer was a Texas Instruments computer and I would spend hours and hours on it just kind of coding. So you'd put in whole zeros of z numbers and eventually like a little worm would just go across the screen, but it would literally take hours. So it's a very natural kind of extension for me, technology. It's it's it's as natural for me to work with technology as as it is to work with music.

Presenter14:35

And you were appointed the government's first ever youth dance champion. That was, I think, two thousand eight to twenty ten. You talk about this experience that you had, you know, dancing round maples or doing the Terrant Tell or whatever it was in gym classes.

Wayne McGregor14:41

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter14:48

Um do you think there's enough of it in schools today? Did you see evidence that these things are still on

Wayne McGregor14:53

Yeah, there's not enough of it. I mean, there has to be more. I mean, I think we've always done ourselves a bit of a disservice in the arts to say that arts is supplementary to maths in English. And I think it's really important that actually dance is as important. One of the reasons that some people go to school is actually to have experiences in drama or experiences in dance. But also kind of that knowledge transfer, the brilliant things that dance has to offer education, just generally, your physical education, yes, but also your mental, creative, innovation education. And that's why I felt I really needed to speak up and to try and get more money into schools for people to really have the opportunity to do more and more of that. And unfortunately, over the last four or five years, that's been eroded and eroded.

Presenter15:29

There will be plenty of parents and other interested parties who hear you say that dance and creativity is as important as maths and they they'll raise an eyebrow at that one.

Wayne McGregor15:38

That's

Presenter15:38

Yeah.

Wayne McGregor15:38

Is that really what you're saying? I think, yeah, I think I'm saying that. I think about all of my experiences in work, and I think most of them are about building relationships with people. They're interpersonal. They're about actually taking the energy of someone, using my energy to be able to convince them to help me develop a project, whatever that is. And those kind of transferable skills, which are about understanding physical intelligence in interesting ways, get you to be able to do things, to make things, to create things. So I think it's super important to understand that intelligences cross many, many domains.

Presenter16:10

Wayne McGregor, it's time to hear some more of your music. Uh we're gonna listen to your fourth.

Wayne McGregor16:13

So this is Impromptu in G-flat major by Schubert. It's a piece of music I first heard when I was in a production of Waiting for Godot when I was sixteen. I played Vladimir in the school canteen with a really inspirational teacher called Tony Watson. And as I was doing one of my speeches, he sat down and played this piece of music over the top of it. And I thought that was really bizarre that actually I was acting my heart out and I had this kind of like Schubert piece next to it. And what it really taught me at that point is two very different kind of art worlds coalescing at the same time to give you added value in terms of meaning. So how is it that music primed with words could say so much more than either in isolation?

Presenter17:56

That was Yeno Yondo playing part of Schubert's impromptu in G flat major. Wayne McGregor, you did a degree in choreography at Leeds, then a spell in New York at the Jose Lehman School there.

Presenter18:07

Why did you decide that you wanted to be a choreographer rather than a dancer?

Wayne McGregor18:11

I think I didn't really decide. I think it kind of, you know, I've got a very long body, as you can see. And what height are you? I'm six foot two. You know, I've got very long limbs. Very long limbs. Yeah, very long. Unusually long. Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things that my body can do because of that is I can fold it almost like origami into kind of quite strange little combinations of stuff. So I always moved in that way. And so I wanted to dance in my own work. It was kind of youthful arrogance in a way. You know, I'd been in America. America at that time was the kind of the center of postmodern dance. These incredible choreographers like Merce Cunningham performing live with John Cage playing live free in the parks. They had this amazing period in New York where you could see practically all the choreographers, Melissa Fenn Lee, Lucinda Childs, all these incredible, really iconic choreographers that I'd only read about perform free all over New York. And it just made you feel that you should just be doing your own thing. So I came back to London with this kind of youthful kind of arrogance and zest for life and wanting to do my own thing. And so I made a little piece.

Presenter18:16

Yeah.

Presenter18:20

Very long. Yeah, very long.

Presenter18:48

Free.

Presenter19:09

And you you set up your first dance troupe when you were twenty two, your first dance company. I mean, that takes a very specific sort of confidence at twenty two. Yeah.

Wayne McGregor19:19

That came naturally to you, did it? It did come naturally. I mean, I w you know, I I started as a dance animateur in London, which is a kind of a professional dancer that animates communities through dance. I did that for two years in East London. And they would give me the local youth centre to rehearse in and I'd make my piece. So that was me l doing things like tea dances for the local community and working with early bilingual learners through dance to teach language. And that again was all about people and people dancing and how that can affect change in terms of regeneration.

Presenter19:46

This idea of dance as a sort of community cohesion, that it can aid that sense of a community coming together. Give me a concrete example of where you

Wayne McGregor19:55

You've seen that.

Presenter19:55

Yeah.

Wayne McGregor19:55

Well, I've seen it in lots of places. A few years ago, quite a few years ago, I did a piece in Northern Ireland with both Protestants and Catholics. And what was really amazing about that, this is just a hundred young people coming together and through dance experience something of what cooperation and working together looks like. And then their parents and their families coming to watch it in a neutral site where actually art is able to in some way surpass or transcend the the immediate political difficulties.

Presenter20:23

And there was evidence you saw evidence, did you, among Catholic and Protestant communities who came together for that purpose of dance, that that actually afterwards those were friendships that last and activities that last?

Wayne McGregor20:34

But also just the conversation. You know, you generate a conversation, you know, through a body and beyond words. You know, that actually if I'm experiencing somebody's weight when they're falling backwards and I'm responsible for making sure that they don't fall and I softly place them on the floor and rotate them round, when you actually feel a body, a real presence in real time, it affects everything about how you feel about that body. You know, it personalizes it, it becomes about the individual. You realize that they're made of the same flesh and blood. It kind of tells you more about your similarities than your differences.

Presenter21:05

Let's have some more music, Wayne. We're on your fifth. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen it?

Wayne McGregor21:09

I've chosen this because, you know, we all have kind of quiet days, and when I have a quiet day, I sometimes need something that's really going to get me going. And what I love about this piece, this is the third movement of Electric Counterpoint by the wonderful composer Steve Reich. And it's a piece that is just so insistent, it kind of pushes you into action to find a way. And I guess as Steve Reich is one of my heroes, I had to include him in my list.

Presenter22:38

That was the third movement of Steve Wright's Electric Counterpoint, played by Johnny Greenwood. Your first main stage performance at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden was Chroma in 2006. Some of the music, memorably, was by Jack White of the White Stripes, and John Pawson had designed this very, as we would expect, minimalist cube of lights. It became a success. Did it.

Wayne McGregor22:55

Minimalist q

Wayne McGregor23:00

Does it feel like a risk?

Wayne McGregor23:01

I think I went in there very naively just to make something I really wanted to make. And I think what I've learnt over time, and I've gone in cycles of doubting and working out whether or not this is the right way to do it, but going in and just really staying true to what you want to make at whatever cost, whether or not that's going to be successful with critics or whether that will work for the company, really make something that you feel a massive imperative to make. And I felt that with Chromo. It was kind of effortless in a way because I really wanted to make that. What surprised me was the reaction to it. And what surprised me since, you know, a decade later, it's in 13 companies in the world and has had a massive impact on ballet in some of the really very classical companies, like for example the Bolshoi in Russia. There was a kind of a nervousness about whether or not their audience would take to it. And there were queues around the theatre and people really loved it. And it was phenomenal being in Russia and hearing those old Russian coaches in their nineties who'd worked in ballet all of their lives and one would expect them to be very conservative, be nothing but full of admiration for the rigour and the precision and the difficulty of that work and understanding that ballet is a twenty-first century art form that has to keep growing, evolving and changing.

Presenter24:05

And so it is the audience as the third party in that collaboration, really. It's their total appreciation of it that really makes the thing stand up.

Wayne McGregor24:12

It is totally. And you know, it that is thrilling when you have a an audience respond to the work in a really phenomenal way. A lot of the learning is when they don't, you know. Because, you know, really, the piece only works when it lives in front of an audience and the energy that you give to an audience you get back or you get it mirrored in a particular kind of way. I used to experience that when I danced. You can really feel every movement in an auditorium when you're out there performing. You get a sense that when you've got three thousand people there, it's just like this block. But no, it's very individualized. You can feel where there's kind of curiosity at one side. You can feel where somebody's getting irritated in the audience. You can see where somebody's coughing. It's very particular. And dancers are super susceptible to that.

Presenter24:51

Let's have some more music, Wayne McGregor. It's time for your sixth piece. Just tell me a little bit about this. Why have you chosen it?

Wayne McGregor24:57

Well this is a piece I've chosen because you know I'm obsessed with collaboration. This is a young artist called Jilin and a track called Unknown Tongues. She's in her early twenties. She's from Gary, Indiana. She spent much of her life working in a steel mill and has just given it up to concentrate on her music full time. I've never heard anything like it in sound. I'm going to work with her because it's a language that's so unfamiliar and I just think she's phenomenal.

Presenter26:00

Unknown Tongues by Gilin. Um Wayne McGregor, the world as it's interpreted or or reimagined for the stage by you it can look intimidating, it can look beautiful, it can look sometimes freakish. I conjured up a couple of names at the beginning, you know, predecessors of yours like Ashton and Macmillan. Quite often to watch their ballets there is a sort of giddying perfection to what they have created.

Presenter26:26

Where do you stand on escapism for escapism's sake?

Wayne McGregor26:28

Well, I think I'm very interested in kind of present tense. Often my work is described as kind of futuristic, and I don't think it's futuristic. I think it's just really dealing with the preoccupations of today. And for me, some of those dystopian kind of ideas are escapist. You know, some of those kind of things that we work on in terms of beauty are beautiful to me. And I think, you know, what's really amazing about the way in which culture has moved is that there's a real range of kind of what the nature of perfection is, you know, and rawness is perfect, you know, minimalism is perfect. Wabasabi is perfect, that handmade touch is perfect. You know, we've got very different kind of barometers of the idealized in a way. And I love that. Are you minimalist at home? I am. Yeah, absolutely, definitely. I love the ideal.

Presenter27:12

What would I see? I walk into your apartment.

Wayne McGregor27:14

Not much.

Presenter27:15

My parents always

Wayne McGregor27:16

My parents always say, When is the furniture coming? Um it's very, very empty. I could happily live with just paintings and books and I guess somewhere to sit. And I think, you know, to move into spaces where actually you've got kind of a space to think and a space to imagine is really wonderful, and I find it restful. You have, of course, had

Presenter27:34

Huge success, but also there are critics who don't like often what they describe as this sort of hyper-kinetic nature of your work.

Wayne McGregor27:41

Nature

Wayne McGregor27:43

Criticism bother you? You know, I I'm uh of the type that reads everything. I try not to take it personally, sometimes that's super hard. But there's always something that one could learn and take from it and maybe use. Some critics, obviously, I use it as a badge of honor that they don't like the work because so often they detest some of the phenomenal makers that I love the most in the world, people like Sabura Teshigawara or Merse Cunningham. Criticism so much is about who people are and h what their filters are and how they make meaning from things, rather than what I'm doing.

Presenter28:11

You work so much, what are your interests outside of dance?

Wayne McGregor28:14

Um well, I like architecture. I like to have some quiet time. We have a beautiful house in uh Kenya on Lamu which has got no roads and no cars, just that African kind of horizon that just goes on and on and on. It's really th the the best place we go where we can just read and swim and play with the dog and just do very, very quiet, normal things.

Presenter28:34

You say we.

Wayne McGregor28:35

Yeah, my with my partner Antoine. My partner and I have been together for thirteen years. He's one of these people that you meet and everybody falls in love with him straight away. But I think the thing that we share the most is that we have an amazing sense of play, and we just do lots of silly things together and laugh a lot.

Presenter28:52

Tell me then about this next piece of music.

Wayne McGregor28:53

So this was easy. This is a Roberta Flack song, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, but sung by George Michael, whose voice in this I think is just phenomenal. And you are choosing it because? I'm choosing it because of Antoine. Partly I really remember the first time I saw his face. And I think everybody, when they interact with him, they get a real sense of joy and love.

Speaker 429:18

The first time

Speaker 429:23

Ever I saw your face.

Speaker 429:33

Thought the sun

Speaker 429:38

Frozen your eyes

Speaker 429:49

Moon and the sky

Presenter29:56

The first time ever I saw your face sung there by George Michael. We spoke at the beginning, Owen McGregor, about the questions you want to explore through your work and through dance. Over the years, I wonder, have your creative endeavours furnished you with many

Presenter30:13

Answers. I don't mean complete answers, but have you found

Presenter30:17

The areas of life have been illuminated in a new way for you through your work.

Wayne McGregor30:21

Yeah, I mean I think so. I mean I think I'm I think we're all aren't we trying to work out why we're here and what's it all about and I think one of the wonderful things about Downs is that I have the real privilege to do that every day in some way. As I get older obviously there's a whole different range of preoccupations because you have this archive of work, you've got this archive of imagination and knowledge and I always believe you know not to trust an expert in a way. In a way what you want to want to do is unlearn. The great choreographer Merce Cunningham said he spent his life unlearning. And I think that's really hard. We all have formulas by which we live. We all have formulas by which we look and experience the world. You know our brain is predisposed to that, to kind of construct meaning in those kind of ways. And so to try and unpick those is actually quite hard to remain open.

Presenter31:04

You said that Cro-Man is now being danced. Did you say thirteen different productions of it around the world?

Wayne McGregor31:08

different productions of it around the world and

Presenter31:11

I suddenly thought, well, well, now you're you're becoming the classicist, you're the person who's who's offering us these classics, you're no longer the disruptor, you're no longer the person who comes in and shows us a different way.

Presenter31:22

Are you comfortable with not being an enfant terrible?

Wayne McGregor31:24

I think it's wonderful because I think what it does, it creates a whole lot of space for these really amazing artists who are working at the edge of culture who should be doing more and more and funded more. You know, I think what the great thing about the art world and again dance is that it's about renewal, it's about new provocations, it's about people of today finding their own way. And I think what's really important about that is partly why I mentor. I don't mentor young choreographers just because I want to be nice to them and I get so much back. I learn a lot. I want actually to use them to provoke me out of any complacency that might sit in my own life. And I think it's really wonderful to be surrounded by young makers who've got that passion of that twenty-two-year-old that I had in the nineties who are really, really pushing at the ages and questioning why you're doing it like that. Does it have to be like that?

Presenter32:11

You're a highly collaborative person and you rely on all sorts of professional support systems to get together these great productions that you mount.

Presenter32:19

Not on the island, mate. You'll be all alone. How is that how are you going to handle that?

Wayne McGregor32:21

How is that?

Wayne McGregor32:24

I don't know. I mean, I'm actually quite good with alone time. I am quite good with alone time. And I think the great thing is,'cause I my instrument is my body, and I should just keep that going.

Presenter32:27

Oh yeah.

Presenter32:33

And what will you do with your body? Will you put your body into training? Will you just practice m

Wayne McGregor32:36

Practice moves, you could have a lot of things. No, I would definitely put my body into training. Whole Pilates regime, swimming, cross-training, yeah, the whole thing. I quite liked you up until now. Okay, that's it. Tell me about your age.

Presenter32:42

Yeah, the whole

Presenter32:44

Tell me about your eighth piece then. What are we going to hear?

Wayne McGregor32:46

Uh

Wayne McGregor32:47

So this is a a piece by the brilliant American composer Steven Sondheim. It's from a production of A Little Night Music that I did the musical staging from in early nineteen nineties, ninety five, and it's called Send in the Clowns sung by Judy Dench.

Speaker 433:13

Isn't it rich?

Speaker 433:19

Are we a pair?

Speaker 433:24

Me here at last on the ground

Speaker 433:28

You

Speaker 433:29

Me dead.

Speaker 433:33

Send in the clowns.

Presenter33:38

Send in the Clowns from the nineteen ninety five National Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music sung there by Dame Judy Dench. Wayne, it's time now for me to give you the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, and you get to take another

Wayne McGregor33:52

Book two, what will your book be? Okay, so I'm going to take Diderot's encyclopedia, which is one of the first ever encyclopedias, but the compilation of drawings, these extraordinary drawings from the Age of Enlightenment that range from politics to philosophy to languages, and work out what they all mean. It's yours.

Presenter34:08

And a luxury, then, as well.

Wayne McGregor34:09

Well luxury I really wanted to bring my whippets but I'm not allowed to do that am I not? No, so I think you know I I would really love an artwork by the Japanese artist Tatsu Miyajima and it's called Life and I love it so much because it's digital, it's spiritual and it really takes me to a place where you really understand why cities are important, why culture is important and why people are important.

Presenter34:13

Am I not?

Presenter34:31

That's yours also, then. And tell me if you had to save just one track. Which one track would it be?

Wayne McGregor34:36

b I would save a winged victory for the Sullen. We played some open chords and rejoiced.

Presenter34:41

It's yours. Wayne McGregor, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island disc. Thank you so much.

Presenter35:26

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter35:29

You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4

Speaker 435:58

This is the BBC.