After walking through what seems like miles of winding hallways lined with rails of costumes – sparkling, fantastical ones for the ballet, drab period for the opera – I am ushered into a small meeting room. Going through the stage door at the Royal Opera House is less glamorous than it sounds. Ornate and cavernous halls, a blend of Italian neoclassical and modern design, turn to mundane, narrow corridors with grey linoleum floors. It is only on the second floor that I catch a glimpse of theatrical splendour. A window opens on to the hollow centre of the building, and metres below me are men in hard hats working away at an imperial golden backdrop.
Minutes after my arrival, the resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet walks in. Wayne McGregor is casually dressed in a jumper and black high tops with thick white laces; he leans back in a chair across from me.
McGregor is Britain’s best known choreographer, renowned for his polymathic approach to dance – which he has just set out in a new book, We Are Movement. Knighted two years ago for services to dance, he is one of the industry’s most prolific figures, no stranger to Hollywood film sets and West End theatres. It was McGregor who choreographed Abba Voyage, the holograph-based performance that has generated £1.5bn in revenue since it opened four years ago. He continues to create works for Studio Wayne McGregor, his own company, and the Royal Ballet, where he has been in residence for two decades – its first choreographer from a contemporary dance background.
When describing his choreography, critics reach for terms such as “genre-defying” or “innovative” but he prefers not to define his work by adjectives, or worry about reviews. “The critical reception around what is perhaps pushing at the edges can sometimes be a little bit lacking,” he says, his Manchester accent barely perceptible. “I find it disappointing. Critical writing is really important. I want the critical writing about the work – whether it’s good or bad – to be excellent. I want the endeavour to be aspirational. I want dance to be really forward thinking.”
McGregor was born in Stockport in 1970. His journey into choreography was less orthodox than for those who came before him; no conservatoire, no long hours dedicated to formal dance training, or “elite dance” as he calls it. His introduction to the medium was through social dance of the Latin American and ballroom varieties. At that time, he “didn’t really know there was a thing called choreography”. Even so, his ballroom teacher encouraged him to create his own routines and teach them to the other dancers. “That had quite a big impact on the way in which I think about democratising dance, or what the hierarchies in dance that might be imploded rather than reinforced are,” he explained.
After sitting his A-levels, in English, history and economics, he hoped to study theatre at university. But at open days he learned that some universities offered dance programmes. One such place was Leeds; there he started learning about choreographic practice. By the age of 22, he had started his own dance company, with no notion that it would one day have an annual turnover of £3m. At 25, he was Judi Dench’s movement director in a production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music at the National Theatre.
What sets McGregor apart is his holistic, even democratic, approach and ethos. He notes the “ballet mentality” still central to the dance industry, “privileging and priming people’s attention to a particular kind of dancing”. That makes it, he feels, “quite difficult for the other stuff to flower and find its way”.
Ballet is often viewed as the foundation of dance as an art. It has the most prestige of all dance genres, and comes with a stringent set of rules, which apply to both the dancer’s technique and the composition of the music. In classical ballet, the story is embedded in movement and gesture. But rather than displaying to the audience what it should think, McGregor’s work evokes feelings through movement instead. “If you’re looking for story explicitly in gesture in a Wayne McGregor ballet, you’ve come to the wrong place,” he says.
Under the influence of ballet, dance in general is often seen as having only two components: the movement and the music. But McGregor thinks it’s bigger than that. “Dance is a total artwork,” he says, echoing Richard Wagner. “Choreography is expressed not just in what I’m doing with the dancer in real-time, but it’s also expressed in the way in which light travels and moves.” He emphasises his words with gestures of his own. “You cannot separate the choreographic part from the design part… The context of the work, the ideas that are transmitting to you as a member of the audience, are all dependent on the interrelatedness of all the elements.”
McGregor’s work goes against the grain of tradition. He blends choreography with emerging technologies – an approach that is not widely accepted in the dance world. “The use of technology is natural,” says McGregor. “Some critics find it difficult to think about the interaction of technology with art-making as if it’s separate from the way in which you live. They still have quite an analogue version of what dance should be.”
The integration of technology and art is centuries in the making, from Da Vinci’s complex stage machinery to the set and costume designs of the Bauhaus school. McGregor’s own interdisciplinary relationships call to mind Loie Fuller, the American inventor-choreographer who introduced mixed-media choreography to the stage, inventing lighting and costume solutions for over 100 works from the 1890s onwards.
This interconnectedness between dance and tech is particularly evident in “Infinite Bodies”and “On the Other Earth”, his recent, installation-based exhibitions at two London venues – Somerset House and Stone Nest respectively. Both focus on the question of the relationships between AI, robotics and dance. At “On the Other Earth” spectators stand in a hollow cylinder lined with 12K high-resolution screens, and are immersed in a 360° viewing experience, a landscape of body shapes. Through 3D glasses dancers appeared within reach of our fingertips. The experience arises out of McGregor’s long history of interdisciplinary collaboration. In Autobiography, an award-winning show from 2017, he based the choreography on his own genetic code.
McGregor doesn’t fear AI. He encourages artists to embrace it. “I’m never worried about AI replacing this complex human system,” he says. “It’ll be able to do things as facsimiles, but it won’t be able to do things which are genuinely expressive and creative because only I, in that moment, have all that experience, knowledge and sensing systems to be able to make that thing happen.” In a live musical performance, for instance, only a real-life musician will have the intuition to react to all the unpredictable situations performing artists find themselves in; algorithms can’t do that. “I don’t think we’re ever going to replace the live physical self. I don’t think that’s the aspiration.”
In fact, AI could benefit the industry, he says. “I think AI would have an amazing place in scheduling dancers’ health, working on programmes that are uniquely tailored to dancers’ particular state of physicality. From a technical and management point of view, AI definitely has a role,” he says. AI is a tool in the human loop of creativity – as it was for Da Vinci before us. “I think [tech] is just part of the vernacular now, one of the other tools that we can use to make things,” he added.
But doesn’t every tool have its drawbacks? McGregor has indeed noticed some of the negative influences tech has had on younger dancers. “Where I see it most is in audition videos… All of the dancing fits an Instagram screen,” he says, lifting his phone towards me for emphasis. “Mainly, the videos are of people kind of noodling in a little corner. It looks fantastic in short amounts of time, but one cannot tell from that if they are really dancing.”
Performing on a screen is different to performing on stage, and when dancers advance to the latter, many lack vital skills. “They can’t connect movement, they can’t sequence movement… they can’t dance.” The miniaturism of their screen performances reveals itself in their diminished performances on the stage.
In 2020, when the pandemic confined many of us to screens, McGregor began working on his book about what he calls “physical intelligence”. “We were really locked in. But also locked in to our bodies,” he says, pointing towards my heavily Post-It noted copy of We Are Movement. The book examines the body’s physical responses to various stimuli, be they mental or sensory. To McGregor, physical intelligence is instinctive and continually evolves – but most of us are detached from it. We Are Movement is an accessible guide for tapping in to this intelligence. In writing it, McGregor drew on his own experience, but also that of scientists, technologists and anthropologists, all intending to reshape the way we perceive and appreciate our physical selves.
McGregor applies the book’s insights in his own practice. In one of the bigger studios of the Royal Opera House, the cast of Woolf Works, a revived production of his 2015 ballet inspired by Virginia Woolf, begins rehearsals. Bouncing energetically between the dancers, McGregor addresses rehearsal notes in what seems to be a secret language shared between dancer and choreographer: a “whoosh” sound prompts a dancer to spin in a different manner, while “bam-bam-bay” holds a meaning undecipherable to me. But the company clearly understands.
“I wanted a user-friendly guide to physical intelligence, the same way that people now think about emotional intelligence in a manner they hadn’t before; that physical intelligence would be part of that vernacular,” he explains the reasoning behind his book. By coincidence, McGregor’s exhibition at Somerset House and the publication of We Are Movement have overlapped. “They’re both like little mini manifestos of how one might be able to experience physical intelligence,” he muses.
He has great ambitions for the book’s ideas; he has expressed an interest in building an institute dedicated to physical intelligence combining academia, artists and commercial partners. He wants a place, he says, “where the central questions of physical intelligence are exercised and resourced and researched in a laboratory setting that can have real-life application, not just for the stage”. Some of these applications might be artistic endeavours, but others might be concerned with health, well-being or even robotics.
If successful, an institute dedicated to our physicality would be McGregor’s most ambitious and impactful project yet, perhaps even surpassing ABBA Voyage. It would take him beyond dance as a service and into something with universal application. Not everyone is a dancer, but everyone has a body. Everyone inhabits the world physically. Everyone needs some form of physical intelligence.
Wayne McGregor will be speaking at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 26 April
We Are Movement
Wayne McGregor
Bloomsbury, 336pp, £20
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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