Limen - 2009

During rehearsals for Limen, Emma Crichton-Miller talked to Wayne McGregor about his creative approach and the development of his new work.

Emma Crichton-Miller: At what point did the title occur to you?

Wayne McGregor: Very early on, actually. I knew that I wanted to work with (Finnish composer) Kaija Saariahoâ's cello concerto Notes on Light, which has at its centre an eclipse of the sun, that interested me in exploring the idea of liminality, thresholds of darkness and light, presence and absence, life and death.

EC-M: Do you always work with the same group of dancers?

WM: I do like to build on the relationships with dancers I have worked with a lot as well as introduce new dancers I've not worked with before to the process. This alchemy of experience and inexperience in the group is always rewarding. I'm also very interested in exploring new partnerships, so that even if I'm working with the same dancers they're not dancing with the same people. It's very much a work in progress in terms of my relationship with the dancers. The people that you know well, you can go deeper with them. They understand your work, they understand how you structure your piece, they don't worry that I make structural decisions very late. They know that I work out of order, that I don't start at the beginning and go through to the end, they've got an idea of how the whole thing bolts together. For new dancers I'm working with a clean slate, and that is really invigorating too.

EC-M: Do you work in a different way with your own company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance than you do with The Royal Ballet?

WM: In every new piece I create the process is different as the individuals in the studio (whatever the company) have their own direct effect on the choreography. That is one of the great motivators of working deeply with both companies, the individuals within them are incredibly inspiring. Equally, there are differences in the circumstances of making. At Random I have the dancers all day for many weeks at a time, exclusively. Their priority is dancing only my work and our collaborative journey together reflects this singular commitment. At The Royal Ballet I can't have the dancers exclusively, and they're doing lots of other repertory simultaneously, so the demands they place on their bodies in a day are different and how I use their precious time is tempered accordingly. Both circumstances, each with their own innate challenges, nurture me in distinctive but highly complimentary ways.

EC-M: Does that mean that The Royal Ballet work develops in parallel, rather than in sequence, with your McGregor | Random Dance work?

WM: Definitely. And I really appreciate and celebrate that approach to my ongoing choreographic development. Of course, many of the huge incentives of working inside the Royal Opera House is the scale of ambition it facilitates. The stage is massive, you have a large company of dancers, you have a full orchestra, you are able to realize pieces that are demanding of resources, and because they don't have to tour you can vision something for that particular stage. At the same time, you have the human resources to realize the dream. The Royal Opera House is really a big, creative collaborative team.

EC-M: Does Limen follow on from Chroma, Nimbus, Infra?

WM: I've definitely tried to do that. Particularly with Chroma and Infra. I was thinking about a piece that might connect with them but that also would be radically incomparable. And I think that really informed my choice of music this time. If ever we did a McGregor triple programme I would want all that work to be able to be on in one evening, quite diverse but of the same hand, with a clear signature beside it. So there are the dancers who've stayed throughout the three pieces, though there are others that are new to each work. Collaboration has been very rich at each stage, continuously with my long term collaborator Lucy Carter lighting each piece and Moritz Junge designing the costumes for all three, and then each individual work influenced by contemporary visual artists and composers: John Pawson/Joby Talbot for Chroma, Julian Opie/Max Richter for Infra and now Tatsuo Miyajima/Kaija Saariaho for Limen. All of the artists have been newly commissioned by the Royal Opera House - I am very proud of that.

EC-M: What has collaboration brought to the project?

WM: I first saw Miyajima's work at the Hayward in the 1990s, and I loved it. It was both a technological and spiritual experience standing in front of one of Tatsuo's blue LED pieces, and that connectedness has stayed with me for a long time. I always wondered how that would fit in a theatrical context. When I first spoke to him about the idea of the piece there was an immediate connection about trying something on that scale. And it's very exciting I think for an artist of that calibre to be working on a live event such as ballet. It reminds us that ballet is a contemporary art form and a critically relevant one. It's a growing, moving, developing art form, not exclusively a repertory art form, though repertory is very very important. The more we can engage with significant contemporary artists in the ballet world, the more we can encourage people to give their attention to the concepts behind ballet, rather than just narrative. Narrative is only one of the ways ballet can be expressive and I am interested in exploring the range and the reach of ballets communicative potential. Beyond that, collaboration keeps you moving on, it stops you being formulaic. I want to feel motivated when I wake up in the morning. I want to feel that I've got something to explore. Dance is so collaborative anyway. If you've got people who are inspired and inspiring, it's bound to infect your work and infect your practice.

EC-M: Infra surprised some people familiar with your work with moments of openly expressive emotion. What will surprise people this time?

WM: I don't know. But there's definitely an emotional aspect to this piece. And I think there's something wonderful about these dancers, how they're able to take dislocating, disorienting physical language and imbue it with emotional resonance. I'm a great believer, as was Merce Cunningham, that the human body can never be without meaning, that the body can never be abstract. The body is inherently literal.

EC-M: What role do ideas play in your choreographic process, as themes or as the ground from which the process takes its start?

WM: I think concepts are starting points from where the imagination begins, points of departure rather than a destination. Limen is not about a particular liminal point or specific threshold that I am showing in dance, I am not trying to be explicit in that way. There is too much concreteness in the world, and dance deals best with ambiguities and multiple meanings anyway. I think that's one of the great difficulties in my work for some viewers, especially particular critics, they hear about where the ideas came from and then want to see explicitly 'that idea' in the final result. It's so reductive and not an approach we utilize when looking at visual arts. And while I think it is my responsibility to communicate to an audience, to touch them in some way, I am thinking about communicating in a multitude of ways. I am designing an EXPERIENCE for the viewer that may stimulate their visual senses, their acoustic senses, their kinaesthetic senses, individually or all at the same time; it may move them emotionally or challenge them intellectually, and all of these are valuable and legitimate layers of meaning, of making sense. The concept gives an initial frame for watching (it intrinsically directs the process and that's a fact, but as an audience member you can be interested in process or not, I don't mind), but then, when watching, you have to see what is there in front of you and allow the meaning to emerge rather than looking for the thing you think should exist from the theme. It's about engaging and discovering rather than expecting and waiting to be told, it's about audiences sitting forward rather than sitting back. Dance is not only a visceral art form, it's also an intellectual one.

EC-M: How do you experience the weight of tradition?

WM: Its only when I have interviews I usually feel this 'assumed' weight about this role I have as Resident Choreographer to The Royal Ballet, the interviewer's version of how it should be and how it used to be.Thankfully, inside the Royal Opera House I don't experience a 'weight of tradition'. Yes, there is a great pride in the repertory and a sincere commitment and responsibility to uphold the standards and freshness of this work, but this is motivating, it's a driver not a restrictive anchor. At the same time what has been fascinating to me about the Royal Opera House is that it is a deeply creative organization, and that creativity is absolutely at its centre. It's a remarkable balance between celebrating the extraordinary richness of the past with a hunger to discover a future. I've had absolutely no resistance to try new ideas, its been the opposite - total openness. I don't feel like an outsider and I have been totally embraced. No more so than by Monica [Mason], she has really championed me and we have worked together to invent how the post of Resident Choreographer could be most relevant/useful today, both to my own creative development and critically to the development of the Company. Since Kenneth Macmillan was the Resident Choreographer, the Company and the dance world has changed a lot. You can't understand a ballet company nowadays without understanding not only its unique history but its wider context. Post-modern dance, the European scene, the globalization of dance, the internet, YouTube, the influence of other art forms on our expectations and literacy as viewers of art, all of these factors have totally changed how we experience our dance content. This is the current dance world in which The Royal Ballet exists, and to thrive it has to find a way of navigating these waters. And we are energetically and passionately working on it!

Emma Crichton-Miller is a freelance arts journalist and a former science and arts television documentary programme maker.