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07/08/2025
“The Wayne McGregor Collection”
The Dante Project [1]
Wayne McGregor (choreography), Thomas Adès (composer)
London Symphony Chorus, Simon Halsey (director)
Tacita Dean (designs), Lucy Carter, Simon Bennison (lighting design)
[Pilgrim]: Edward Watson (Dante), Gary Avis (Virgil), Sarah Lamb (Beatrice); [The Selfish]: Lukas B. Braesdsrod, David Donnelly, Benjamin Ella, Hannah Grennell, Melissa Hamilton, Meaghan Grace Hinkis, Mayara Magri, David Yudes; [Ferryman]: Marcelino Sambe, Yasmine Naghdi; [Poets]: David Donnelly, Nocol Edmonds, Benjamin Ella, Joonhyuk Jun, Tomas Mock, Giacomo Rovero, Stanislaw Wegrzyn; [Francesca and Paolo]: Francesca Hayward, Matthew Ball; [Ulysses]: Calvin Richardson, Lukas B. Braendstrod, Harry Churches, Ashley Dean,Leticia Dias, Leo Dixon, Hannah Grennell, Joshua Junker, Sae Maeda, Katharina Nikelski, David Yudes, artists of The Royal Ballet; [Forest of Suicides]: Anna Rose O’Sullivan, Luca Acri, Annette Buvoli, Ashely Dean, Leticia Dias, Hannah Grenell, Melissa Hamilton, Francesca Hayward, Meaghan Grace Hinkis, Fumi Kaneko, Sae Maeda, Mayara Magri, Yasmine Naghdi, Katharine Nikelski, Romany Pajdak, Julia Roscoe; [Soothsayers]: Paul Kay, Joseph Sissens; [The Wrathful]: Hannah Grennell, Melissa Hamilton, Meaghan Grace Hinkis, Mayara Magri; [The Pope’s Adagio]: James Hay; [Stations of the Cross]: Lukas B. Braendsrod, Harry Churches, Ashley Dean, Leticia Dias, Leo Dixon, Hannah Grennell, Joshua Junker, Sae Maeda, Katharina Nikelski, David Yudes; [Thieves]: Luca Acri, Matthew Ball, Leo Dixon, Benjamin Ella, James Hay, Joshua Junker, Paul Kay, Giacomo Rovero, Marcelino Sambe, Joseph Sissens, Stanislaw Wegrzyn; [Satan]: Fumi Kaneko
Woolf Works: A Tryptich [2]
Wayne McGregor (choreography), Max Richter (composer)
Anush Hovhannisyan (soprano), Gillian Anderson (speaker), London Symphony Chorus, , Simon Halsey (director), Orchestra of The Royal Opera House, Koen Kessels (conductor)
[I Now, I Then (from “Mrs. Dalloway”)]: Alessandra Ferri; Federico Bonelli, Gary Avis, Francesca Hayward, Beatriz Stix-Brunell, Edward Watson, Akane Takada, Calvin Richardson; [Becomings (from “Orlando”)]: Gary Avis, Matthew Ball, Calvin Richardson, Francesca Hayward | Paul Kay, Sarah Lamb, Steven McRae, Natalia Osipova, Beatriz Stix‑Brunell, Akane Takada, Eric Underwood, Edward Watson; [Tuesday (from “The Waves”)]: Alessandra Ferri, Federico Benelli, Sarah Lamb, Luca Acri, Camille Bracher, Mica Bradbury, David Donnelly, Benjamin Ella, Kevin Emerton, Isabella Gasparini, Solomon Golding, Hannah Grennell, Tierney Heap, Meaghan Grace Hinkis, Tomas Mock, Anna Rose O’Sullivan, Marcelino Sambe, Leticia Stock, Calvin Richardson, Gina Storm-Jensen, David Yudes, Madeline de Andrade, Mia Bailey, Sacha Barber, George Cox, Jarad Jackson, Eve Simpson
Three Ballets by Wayne McGregor
Wayne McGregor (choreographer), Max Richter [4], Joby Talbot, Jack White III [3], Kaija Saariaho [5] (music)
Natalia Bonner (violin), Nick Barr (viola), Helen Rathbone, Chris Worsey (cello), The Max Richter Quintet, Barry Wordsworth, Daniel Capps (conductors)
[Chroma, 3]: Federico Bonelli, Ricardo Cervera, Mara Galeazzi, Sarah Lamb, Steven McRae, Laura Morera, Ludovic Ondiviela, Tamara Rojo, Eric Underwood, Jonathan Watkins, Edward Watson
[Infra, 4]: Leanne Benjamin, Ricardo Cervera, Yunui Choe, Lauren Cuthbertson, Mara Galeazzi, Melissa Hamilton, Ryoichi Hirano, Paul Kay, Marianela Nunez, Eric Underwood, Jonathan Watkins, Edward Watson, artists of The Royal Ballet
[Limen, 5]: Leanne Benjamin, Yuhui Choe, Tristan Dyer, Mara Galeazzi, Melissa Hamilton, Paul Kay, Sarah Lamb, Brian Maloney, Steven McRae, Marianela Nunez, Ludovic Ondiviela, Leticia Stock, Akane Takada, Eric Underwood, Edward Watson
Live recording: The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, England (November 13‑14, 2008 [4], November 13 & 17, 2009 [5], June 10‑11, 2010 [3], February 8, 2017 [2], October 21 & 26, 2021 [1]) – 291’ (including 40’ bonus) – Directed for screen by Ross MacGibbon
Opus Arte OA 1380BD (or Blu-ray OA BD7318BD) – NTSC 16:9 (anamorphic) – LPCM 2.0/DTS 5.1 – Region code: 0 (Distributed by Naxos of America) – Booklet in English, French and German (Subtitles in English, French, German, Japanese and Korean – Extras only for The Dante Project and French, German and Spanish – Extras only for Chroma, Infra and Limen)
British dance maker Wayne McGregor’s ballets have expanded the classical and contemporary repertoire at The Royal Ballet since he became the company’s resident choreographer in 2006. His dynamic range is showcased in Opus Arte’s three‑disc set of five ballets, filmed at London’s Royal Opera House (ROH). It is a deep dance dive into McGregor’s unique ballet fusion.
Chroma | Infra | Limen
McGregor cites The Royal’s core neoclassicism built on Frederick Ashton and Kenneth McMillian, and McGregor is an artistic descendant of Graham and Cunningham. McGregor’s ‘octopus’ body fluidity, his signature, are used in both Chroma and Infra with an immediacy into his choreographic template, however abstract, which has a body of electric musicality. McGregor’s choreographic originality and range is fully showcased in these films.
Three of his most defining works, filmed in 2008, showcase McGregor’s innovative concepts of pure movement that are unconnected to narrative, yet allow environments for classical dancers to express within their lustrous technical precision, athleticism and ensemble prowess. These ballets are distinctive in different ways, but Limen is exemplary of McGregor’s liberated artistry. The piece is scored to Kaija Saariaho: Limen ‘Notes on Light’ a cello concerto with its long bowing passages, bending, ascending, crashing and lyrically dissonant while the piano counterpoint fades in and out. It is captivating, but McGregor notes that the work “doesn’t lend itself to choreographic propositions.”
McGregor locked into its “Atmospheric resonance and the emotionality of the music.” It’s directly translated into reflexive choreography and embodied by the cast. McGregor unleashes exquisite artistic facility of The Royal Ballet dancers. A distinctive feature of his choreographies is that he will “throw out” anything that looks like a phrase or idea that he has used before.
The literary worlds of Virginia Woolf and Dante’s 700 year old poem, which tell about the journey through the underworld, is fertile ground for McGregor. Both are three‑act ballets that highlight the company’s prowess as dancers-actors, performing roles that are complex yet provide these ballets with more accessibility than stock roles from classical repertory.
Woolf Works: A Tryptich
In his introduction to Woolf Works, McGregor explains that Virginia Woolf’s contemplation of the word and dance vocabulary are equally durable. Here, McGregor envisions an illusory bio‑dance in scenes depicting her life and using characters from her own novels. It opens with a recording of Virginia Woolf talking about words and their durable agency, McGregor’s choreographic jumping off point, vis‑à‑vis a dance vocabulary.
The Royal Ballet star Alessandra Ferri portrays Woolf, hypnotic in its stillness as a specter contemplating her own life and moving through the events of her life and scenarios of her novels with lyrical precision en pointe, figuratively and literally, in an altogether virtuosic performance.
Dancers onstage portray characters in her novels, her younger self, along with her life with husband, Leonard, fading in and out. The aforementioned is most vividly evoked in I Now, I Then (from “Mrs. Dalloway”). McGregor depicts the scene when the shell‑shocked committing suicide episode involves the stunning duet with Gary Avis and Edward Watson. McGregor, again, does not shy away from Virginia Woolf’s gay themes in her books or in her life.
Composer Max Richter, a frequent McGregor collaborator, is also a prolific film composer, and this is clearly one of the impressive features inside Woolf Works. Richter avoids symphonic filmic scaffolding. His approach, here, is more thematically intimate for the ballet dancers and the staging, meanwhile the ROH musicians’ detailing is sumptuous and moves throughout. Maggie Smith reads passages from The Waves and Jillian Anderson’s performance involves the reading of Woolf’s suicide note over the last scene of the ballet.
The Dante Project
Composer Thomas Adès’ score for The Dante Project is a jarring operatic scale that can be narratively descriptive, opaque, wandering, panicky, darkly ambient when not being harrowing as more shadowy themes emerge. There’s Wagnerian grandeur and even a rousing Moulin‑Rouge‑y Can‑Can with the sinners dancing on a cloud of smoke twirling endlessly in grandes pirouettes and fouetté turns and leaps.
Production for The Dante Project was delayed for a year because of the Covid pandemic. Dante’s allegorical implications are the focus in a time of the world still navigating the devastation of the pandemic. McGregor cites the fact that people were in a purgatory not knowing what to do or what was going to happen.
The ensemble sections are peppered with dancers in various solos, pairings or configurations that occur simultaneously with pas de deux dancers and trios. “Dante describes tortured and tormented bodies, in extreme states of awful physical affliction, and these are amazing anchors for a physical vocabulary,” the choreographer told the New York Times’ dance writer Rosyln Sulcus at its premiere.
In development phases right before the pandemic hit, McGregor pulled the plug on The Dante Project, that, in turn, became “...an allegory of our times,” “...people have literally been through a personal hell, and we’ve all gone through this period of purgatory, of stasis, of not knowing.”
All of the themes of eternal struggle are built-in as Dante and Virgil journey through a dreamscape of desperate humanity and unknowable redemption. The ensemble of ‘sinners’, a crucible of tragediaand ensemble mayhem, is, after all, the inferno and commedia divina of sinners and universal truths.
The igniting of pristine ballet techniques with infusions of contemporary ballet trends completely idiosyncratic. These live performances at the Royal Albert Hall are straightforward: sharp dance choreography, and impressive full stage cinematography. Camera shots don’t feel distant or airless, which is so often the case on dance films.
Thomas Adès’ score contains clamorous symphonics (i.e. Exile-the dark forest) with principal dancer Edward Watson bolting onstage in feral spins and slashing arm movements. Soon he’s surrounded by black body‑suited specters (The Sinners) in a dance melee and through scènes d’action such as “Pavan of the Souls in Limbo”, “The Forest of Suicides”, “The Wrathful”, “Thieves” and “Satan”, among others.
The gates of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is a crucible movement of Dante’s journey into the underworld with its expressionist physicality and set against a desperate emotional wilderness. Conceived by McGregor and his shadowy set designs and mythic thresholds, it also blends masterfully with lighting designer, Lucy Carter.
Kudos to Wayne McGregor and his design team’s unmistaken energy of live performance and the power of the individual. Together, that is a rarity these days.
Lewis J. Whittington
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