Royal Ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor had no access to elite ballet schools growing up. But he did have John Travolta and disco to spark a lifelong obsession. Now he wants to make dancers of us all
Long before Wayne McGregor became a star choreographer famed for cerebral experimentation and edgy imagination, he was a disco fiend. His earliest inspiration was John Travolta. Not cool, Pulp Fiction-era Travolta, but the glinty-eyed, gyrating disco bunny from Saturday Night Fever and Grease. “What I’ve always loved about him is his effortlessness,” McGregor says. “I think that’s what makes a great dancer: effortlessness and spontaneity, whether you’re on the dancefloor or the stage.”
The disco beginnings make sense. McGregor came from a modest 1970s Stockport household with no access to elite ballet schools, and his first dance teacher, Marjorie Barlow, who ran a Latin and ballroom studio, had a poster of Travolta on her wall, too. Maybe as a result of these early years, McGregor has spoken of dance in iconoclastic ways: as an opportunity to “misbehave beautifully” he said in a Ted Talk, and of ballet as a 21st-century art form that should evolve and change, on Newsnight. He has a track record of collaborating with non-dancers as well: he worked on the first Harry Potter film and has since been movement director to the likes of Thom Yorke, Olafur Eliasson, the White Stripes and Nick Knight, alongside coders, neuroscientists, software engineers. He is currently working with Ian McKellen on Hamlet; Margaret Atwood on adapting her climate trilogy, MaddAddam; and the Royal Ballet/Paris Opera Ballet on adapting Dante’s Divine Comedy.
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