Wayne McGregor and Max Richter on the ballet born from the Atwood trilogy

Wayne McGregor is the master of creative collaboration. As resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet in London, a position he has held since 2006, he has translated an eclectic list of literary, avant-garde and contemporary references into works for the stage (along with costumes in collaboration with Grace Wales Bonner and with Burberry). the management of film, television, fashion and music video projects and founded his own London studio.

His latest project is an adaptation of the novel trilogy by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake, The year of the flood And MaddAddaminto a three-act ballet. The project marks the 16th anniversary of his collaboration with composer Max Richter, whose haunting, post-classical music forms the soundtrack to Atwood’s post-apocalyptic nightmare.

As the duo prepare for the Royal Ballet’s performances, titled MaddAddamIn November 2024, following the 2022 production’s debut at the National Ballet of Canada in Toronto, they reflect on how they brought their ballet to life and why they capture a mood and not a story.

Wayne McGregor and Max Richter in conversation

Wayne McGregor: The first time I heard Max’s music was at a concert at the Union Chapel in north London. I knew Max and his music a little, but it was the first time I experienced live music with electronics. It touched me in an incredible way. I went backstage to say hello and then checked in to do something.

Max Richter: Everything we’ve worked on since then has been pretty diverse, but the interesting thing is that even though the projects are very different, we always feel like we’re entering this laboratory of possibilities.

WM: We have a lot of options for what we want to spend our time doing, so at the end of the day it has to be something that gets Max in the mood. I try never to ask a composer to write something for dance, I don’t find that interesting.

MISTER: What I like about the things we do together is that it doesn’t feel prescriptive in any way. What we make is a kind of hybrid composite object. Music is part of it, but there are other elements, and they constantly interact dynamically. It has a sort of puzzle-solving aspect to it. You start in this dark space and then move into it by placing objects in it, be they musical or sensory or whatever they may be. And the feeling of being able to connect things is what’s exciting when you see how you get feedback loops with other elements and ideas.

WM: We work completely differently. I want to give a lot of space for reflection, this is the area in which we will work. Max, how would you react? The other thing that’s important to me, which sounds a little prosaic but is actually crucial, is that Max is, at his best, so reliable. And what I mean by “reliable” is that if he says I’ll send you music on X, he’ll send you music on X.

MISTER: This is how we create the thematic universe, and it is precisely in this sense that it is dystopian.

WM: And working on it during the coronavirus crisis changed the way we talked about the novels, because it’s about a pandemic and we had a much better understanding of what a pandemic is.

“Margaret Atwood is a tough intellectual.” There is no sentimentality in the books.
Max Richter

(Image credit: Frederike Helwig)

MISTER: The writing style is tender, but Margaret is a very tough intellectual. There is no sentimentality in the books, but since the pandemic was real, the narrative seemed more emotional. And there’s a million different languages in there, and that’s really satisfying. Everything works too, so everything possible is included in this music. It’s super diverse. There’s orchestral music, electronics, experimental things and techno. It reflects this very hallucinatory multi-world. I think I also try to do things where the actual notes add up to something, like traditional classical music does, just note to note, relationships and geometry. So I knew it could be big, but I also wanted something that only existed on one or two instruments.

WM: That makes sense to me because the whole idea of choreographing to music that’s already descriptive and then physically doing it again was never interesting to me. In a way, I think our collaboration was partly obviously mutual, but also parallel. What you’re doing is offering a set of textures that I couldn’t physically realize, but that correlate in some way to the world that can exist outside of this moment. And I think that’s important.

MISTER: I agree. Music is a cyclical thing, we kind of know where we want to go with it. In a way, the details of the music disappear once we as an audience have learned them in performance. But it’s the way the language of movement occasionally fits together and your heart explodes when you see that suddenly there’s something there and that moment changes your life.

WM: And you don’t tell a traditional narrative. It’s about how we live and how we live still experience the world. We don’t experience it in the state where we always know what our thoughts are. I’ve always found this a bit strange in an art form like dance, which handles ambiguity so well. It doesn’t handle concreteness well. Why are you trying to be concrete? I just don’t understand that. How do you describe the characters, the costumes, the summary…

MISTER: It would be a nightmare.

Max Richter in a blue jacket

(Image credit: Frederike Helwig)

“If you’ve never read the novels, you’ll get a sense of their spirit in the works, and I think that’s what dance does best.”
Wayne McGregor

WM: We wouldn’t have a chance. And I think that’s one of the reasons Margaret let us do this. She knew that we were going to do a rendition that was about the feeling, the somatic or acoustic feeling of this work. And then when you lay that out, all these interesting relationships emerge. Does it matter that the character you see halfway through the second act is Toby, or does the way she moves and interacts with others tell you something about that character? It’s much more implicit, but I think it’s a different way to experience the novels. Margaret was thrilled; I was worried about this because we had a lot of, well, dead authors. We wanted to have a living author who would be there and observe it and experience it – we wanted her to enjoy it. And I never have that feeling. I wanted her to be blown away. I wanted to give her some of what she inspired in us. If you’ve never read the novels, you’ll get a sense of their spirit in the works, and I think that’s what dance does best. It is the essence of a thing, not a particular thing itself.

MISTER: That’s one of the things I love about our work together – this collective thinking. It’s wonderful to be here.

WM: It’s always about connecting dance with the world. It is important. And some people come to the album through the ballet, and some people come to the ballet through the concert. There are all these different access points to the world that we share.

Wayne McGregor’s production of MaddAddam runs from 14 to 30 November 2024 at the Royal Opera & Ballet House, London WC2. Tickets, £8 – £145, rbo.org.uk

This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Wallpaper*Available October 11th in print on newsstands, in the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and for Apple News+ subscribers. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Wayne McGregor and Max Richter photographed in McGregor’s studio at Here East in London’s Olympic Park in September 2024

(Image credit: Frederike Helwig)

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