Studio Wayne McGregor announces its 2024-25 programme

Studio Wayne McGregor announces its 2024-25 programme with a landmark exhibition at Somerset House, the world’s first post-cinematic, choreographic installation and bold global premieres, tours and revivals.

IN SHORT

Somerset House will present the first major exhibition to explore and expand on the 30-year career of director and choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor as part of its 25th birthday programme in 2025. The exhibition, entitled WAYNE MCGREGOR: INFINITE BODIES, will take place from 23 October 2025 to 22 February 2026. As the closing exhibition of ‘Somerset House at 25′, audiences will be able to step inside McGregor’s polymath practice, which has led him beyond the stage and into creative collaborations across an array of artistic forms, scientific disciplines, and cutting-edge technologies – all centred around the nature of physical intelligence.

Wayne McGregor and Jeffrey Shaw join forces to create ON THE OTHER EARTH, a post-cinematic choreographic installation that combines dance performance, choreography, digital imaging, multi-modal sensing, AI, audience interactivity and spatialized sound into a humanly thought-provoking and magical 21st-century experience. Leveraging the interaction paradigms of Jeffrey Shaw’s pioneering media art practice, ON THE OTHER EARTH will take place in Shaw’s new radically sensory nVis installation – the world’s first 360-degree stereoscopic LED cinematic screen.

McGregor brings Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic vision to London’s The Royal Opera House for the UK premiere of MADDADDAM in November 2024, in a production with The Royal Ballet. The full-length production is based on the writer’s monumental trilogy Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, and features a specially commissioned score from Max Richter and bold costumes by Gareth Pugh. 

McGregor’s Deepstaria performed by Company Wayne McGregor, which premiered at Montpellier Danse Festival in June 2024, will embark upon a world tour beginning in Hong Kong in September 2024, with its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells in February 2025. In Deepstaria – a title inspired by an enigmatic species of jellyfish with a stellar-sounding name – McGregor conjures a highly sensory, meditative pure dance and sound experience which reflects on our profound relationship with the void and our own mortality.

Autobiography (v98, v99, v100, v101, v102, v103, v104), a dance portrait inspired by the sequencing of Wayne McGregor’s genetic code that premiered at Sadler’s Wells in London in 2017, continues its world tour in October 2024, beginning in Toronto. Additionally, UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey, which premiered at The Royal Opera House in London in 2022, continues its European tour beginning in Italy in November 2024.

Revivals will include Infra, which was created in collaboration with Julian Opie, Max Richter and Lucy Carter as a response to the July 2005 London bombings. It will make its debut with the Royal Swedish Ballet in February 2025, followed by Ballett Zurich later in the year. Chroma, McGregor’s celebrated, Olivier-award-winning work which explores the drama of the human body and its ability to communicate extremes of thought and emotion, will be revived on the San Francisco Ballet in February 2025. Obsidian Tear, McGregor’s first work on an all-male cast which premiered in 2016 and brings together two works for violin by renowned Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, will be revived on the Ballet Opéra National de Bordeaux in April 2025.

Wayne McGregor was recently reappointed as the Artistic Director of the Dance Department of La Biennale di Venezia for the two-year term 2025/2026, following his four-year tenure. McGregor, who was named Director of Venice Biennale Danza in 2021, will announce his programme for the 19th annual Festival of Contemporary Dance in April 2025. For his fourth programme in July 2024, We Humans, McGregor explored the very nature of what it is to be human, and the limitless possibilities of artistic collaboration and creation.  

In January 2025, Studio Wayne McGregor will unveil the six artists included in the second iteration of RESIDENT 6, its year-round artist residency programme for next-generation creatives pushing the boundaries of dance, movement and physical intelligence.

Finally, ABBA Voyage, the revolutionary concert that launched the Swedish pop sensations back onto the stage in May 2022 for an outstanding avatar performance choreographed by Wayne McGregor, continues to book throughout 2025.  

IN DETAIL

WAYNE MCGREGOR: INFINITE BODIES, SOMERSET HOUSE
Three decades of Dance, Design and Technology
24 October 2025 – 22 February 2026
Somerset House
Strand
London, WC2R 1LA

WAYNE McGREGOR: INFINITE BODIES will celebrate McGregor and his trail-blazing collaborations that have radically redefined how we think about performance, movement, and the body. As the closing exhibition of ‘Somerset House at 25′, audiences will be invited to step inside McGregor’s polymath practice, which has led him beyond the stage and into creative collaborations across an array of artistic forms, scientific disciplines, and cutting-edge technologies – all centred around the nature of physical intelligence. The exhibition will bring together McGregor’s celebrated choreographic installations and spectacular new commissions that will explore the incredible possibilities and untapped potentials afforded to the body by rapidly evolving technologies.

WORLD PREMIERES

ON THE OTHER EARTH

ON THE OTHER EARTH, a new post-cinematic choreographic installation will premiere in July 2025. Leveraging the interaction paradigms of Jeffrey Shaw’s pioneering media art practice, ON THE OTHER EARTH will take place in Shaw’s new radical nVis installation – the world’s first 360-degree stereoscopic LED cinematic screen, utilising a comprehensive instrumentarium of sensing technologies.  The installation refracts, evolves and re-imagines dance’s DNA into a startlingly original new form of experience. In exploring these unique visualization and interaction paradigms ON THE OTHER EARTH combines dance performance, choreography, digital imaging, multi-modal sensing, AI, audience interactivity and spatialized sound into a humanly thought-provoking and magical 21st-century experience.’

For a long time, I have dreamt of a performance platform that could upend the very nature of choreographic presentation. An environment where the audiences are in control of their experience and where their journey through the dance work is individual and unique – never to be repeated in the same way twice. A system where the technological hardware does not affect my human software in any adverse way, where indeed the sense-making is direct, embodied and empathetic; equivalent to the live dance performance, and where the senses are augmented, physicality extended and the body and mind re-inspired. – Wayne McGregor

   UK PREMIERES

MADDADDAM

The Royal Ballet
Main Stage, Royal Opera House, London
14^th November – 30^th November 2024

A co-production between The Royal Ballet and The National Ballet of Canada

Direction and Choreography Wayne McGregor
Music Max Richter
Creative Consultant Margaret Atwood
Set Designer We Not I
Costume Designer Gareth Pugh
Lighting Designer Lucy Carter
Film Designer Ravi Deepres
Dramaturgy Uzma Hameed
Sound System Designer Chris Ekers

Conductor Koen Kessels
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

MADDADDAM, based on Margaret Atwood’s monumental trilogy Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, makes its anticipated UK premiere at the Royal Opera House in London in November 2024 with The Royal Ballet. Where does our humanity lie and where are we headed? In an imagined future not far from our own, a bio-engineered apocalypse has changed the Earth as we know it. An incongruous group of survivors must navigate a dangerous present – and make sense of the past. This ballet triptych, which premiered at the National Ballet of Canada in November 2022, is a visceral exploration of themes of extinction and invention, hubris, and humanity, love and loss that are spliced together with aspects of Atwood’s non-fiction writings and activist voice in this exhilarating exploration of life beyond societal collapse.  McGregor has assembled a remarkable team of creative collaborators. They include a specially commissioned score from Max Richter, lighting by Lucy Carter, bold costumes by Gareth Pugh, design by We Not I, film by Ravi Deepres, and dramaturgy by Uzma Hameed.

DEEPSTARIA

Company Wayne McGregor
Sadler’s Wells, London
27^th February – 2nd March 2025

Concept, Direction, Choreography and Design Wayne McGregor
In Collaboration with

CHOREOGRAPHY
Company Wayne McGregor

DESIGN
Theresa Baumgartner LIGHTING
Benjamin Males SET
Ilaria Martello COSTUME
Hannah Martin JEWELLERY

SOUND COMPOSITION Nicolas Becker & LEXX. Powered by Bronze.
DRAMATURGY Uzma Hameed
LIGHTING ASSOCIATE Ben Kreukniet

“Let us journey into the heart of a black hole. Let us slip beyond its boundary, the horizon, and tumble – on and on – down this crack in the universe.” – Carlo Rovelli

Journeying beyond ourselves, we search for knowledge to illuminate and develop our human condition. At the same time, these spaces of infinite blackness, womb-like, are strangely familiar – sounding forgotten connections deep within, and stirring, perhaps, faint echoes of unconscious states of being, floating in places of before and after. – Wayne McGregor

Wayne McGregor’s Deepstaria, performed by the beguiling dancers of Company Wayne McGregor and which premiered at Montpellier Danse Festival in June 2024, embarks upon a global tour beginning in Hong Kong in September 2024, with its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells in February 2025.

 In Deepstaria – a title inspired by an enigmatic species of jellyfish with a stellar-sounding name – McGregor conjures a highly sensory, meditative pure dance and sound experience which reflects on our profound relationship with the void and our own mortality.  Since the beginning of time, humankind has had a fascination with the void. From deep sea to deep space, these dark, mysterious zones ignite both our imagination and our desire to explore our world to its limits. Utilising Vantablack Vision® technology on stage to create unfathomable darkness, McGregor visions an environment that disturbs traditional hierarchies of perception. In this void, acoustic imagery and animative music by Oscar-winning sound designer Nicolas Becker and renowned music producer LEXX create a sonic dreamscape that is continuously recomposed and performed by revolutionary digital audio engine Bronze AI* – thus re-configuring the relationship between live dance and live recorded music in real-time.

Like the jellyfish with its capacity for regeneration, Deepstaria invites us to dream anew our immortal connection with the universe that holds us.

Deepstaria is conceived as the first work in a diptych.  The second: On the Other Earth (a choreographic installation) will premiere in 2025 in Jeffrey Shaw’s nVis, the world’s first 360 LED interactive post-cinematic screen, utilising its comprehensive instrumentarium of sensing technologies. 

COMPANY WAYNE MCGREGOR ON TOUR

DEEPSTARIA

Grand Theatre, Xiqu Centre, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong
20th September 2024 – 21st September 2024

Pfalzbau Bühnen Ludwigshafen, Germany
7th November 2024

Teatro Luciano Pavarotti, Modena, Italy
13th November 2024

Sala Teatro, LAC Lugano, Switzerland
16th November 2024

Sadler’s Wells, London
27th February 2025 – 2nd March 2025

Concept, Direction, Choreography and Design Wayne McGregor
In collaboration with

CHOREOGRAPHY
Company Wayne McGregor

DESIGN
Theresa Baumgartner LIGHTING
Benjamin Males SET
Ilaria Martello COSTUME
Hannah Martin JEWELLERY
SOUND COMPOSITION Nicolas Becker & LEXX. Powered by Bronze.
DRAMATURGY Uzma Hameed
LIGHTING ASSOCIATE Ben Kreukniet

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 (V98 & V99)
Fall For Dance North, TMU Theatre, Toronto, Canada
1^st October 2024 – 2^nd October 2024

(V100 & V101)
Mountain Stage, 2024 Annual Festival at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, Tivoli, New York
5^th October 2024 – 6^th October 2024

(V102 & V103)
York Theatre Royal, United Kingdom
25^th October 2024 – 26^th October 2024

(V104)
Wonderfruit Festival, Thailand
12^th December 2024

Concept and Direction Wayne McGregor

Choreography Wayne McGregor, in collaboration with the dancers

Music Jlin
Set Design and Projection Ben Cullen Williams
Lighting Design Lucy Carter
Costume Design Aitor Throup
Dramaturgy Uzma Hameed
Autobiography Algorithm Nick Rothwell

Autobiography (v98, v99, v100, v101, v102, v103, v104), a dance portrait inspired by the sequencing of Wayne McGregor’s genetic code that premiered at Sadler’s Wells in London in 2017, begins its world tour in October 2024 in Toronto.

Genetic code, AI and choreography merge in a work that re-imagines and remakes itself anew for every performance.  

UNIVERSE: A DARK CRYSTAL ODYSSEY

Ferrara Teatro Comunale, Italy
2^nd November 2024

Gallus Hall, Ljubljana, Slovenia
5^th November 2024

Pfalzbau Bühnen Ludwigshafen, Germany
9^th November 2024

Latvian National Opera and Ballet, Riga, Latvia
26^th – 27^th November 2024

Põlva Culture Center, Estonia
30^th November 2024

Estonia Theatre, Tallinn, Estonia
3^rd December 2024

Director and Choreographer Wayne McGregor

Music Joel Cadbury
Film Design Ravi Deepres
Dramaturg Uzma Hameed
Lighting Design Lucy Carter
Costume and Head Pieces Philip Delamore and Dr. Alex Box
Spoken Word Artist Isaiah Hull

UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey, which premiered at The Royal Opera House in London in Wayne McGregor’s UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey, reimagines Jim Henson’s cult 1982 film The Dark Crystal – a darkly fantastical epic with mythological underpinnings and ecological overtones – as a potent tale for today in its depiction of an earth in peril, torn apart by extremes and in desperate need of healing. Performed by the dancers of Company Wayne McGregor.

REVIVALS

INFRA

Royal Swedish Ballet
Royal Swedish Opera House, Stockholm, Sweden
7th February – 15 March 2025

Ballett Zürich
Opernhaus Zürich, Switzerland
29th March – 11th June 2025

Concept, Direction and Choreography Wayne McGregor

Music Max Richter
Set Design Julian Opie
Costume Design Moritz Junge
Lighting Design Lucy Carter
Sound Associate Chris Ekers

Infra, which was created in collaboration with Julian Opie, Max Richter and Lucy Carter as a response to the July 2005 London bombings and premiered at the Royal Opera House in London in 2008, will enter the repertoire of the Royal Swedish Ballet in February 2025, before it is revived on Ballet Zurich in March 2025.

Coming from the Latin word for ‘below’, Infra presents a portrait of life beneath the surface of the city. This abstract ballet delves beneath the surface to present a moving mediation on human interactions. With an LED screen running the width of the stage revealing a mesmerising flow of Julian Opie’s walking figures, Infra features twelve dancers moving through solos, duets and ensembles. Accompanying the work is Max Richter’s elegiac score, which mixes melancholy string melodies with electronic sounds.

CHROMA

San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco
13^th February 2025 – 19^th February 2025

Concept, Direction and Choreography Wayne McGregor

Music Joby Talbot and Jack White III
Arranged by Joby Talbot, Orchestrated by Christopher Austin
Set Design John Pawson
Costume Design Moritz Junge
Lighting Design Lucy Carter

Chroma, which explores the drama of the human body and its ability to communicate extremes of thought and emotion, will be revived on the San Francisco Ballet in February 2025. The score, drawn from original music by Joby Talbot and his arrangements of music by American rock band The White Stripes, is combined with stark, minimalist designs by architect John Pawson. Against this backdrop is set the inventive and energy-driven choreography of McGregor. Chroma had its premiere in 2006 at The Royal Opera House and in 2007 received an Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.            

OBSIDIAN TEAR

Ballet Opéra National de Bordeaux
Grande Théâtre de Bordeaux, France
8^th – 16^th April 2024

Concept, Direction and Choreography Wayne McGregor

Music Esa-Pekka Salonen
Set design Wayne McGregor
Fashion Director and Designers Katie Shillingford, Craig Green, Hood By Air, Julius, Gareth Pugh, Assaf Reeb, Christopher Shannon, Telfar, Vivienne Westwood
Lighting design Lucy Carter
Dramaturgy Uzma Hameed

As nations gravitate towards nationalistic politics, the issues of transphobia and restrictions on personal autonomy are escalating. This trend is leading to more control over individuals’ rights to their own bodies. How, instead, can we be compassionate and empathetic and use our love to create a society of belonging? – Wayne McGregor 

Obsidian Tear, the first work choreographed by Wayne McGregor on an all-male cast, premiered at The Royal Opera House in London in 2016. A visceral exploration of myth and modernity, Obsidian Tear, will be revived at the Grande Théâtre de Bordeaux, France, in April of 2024. The ballet brings together two works for violin by renowned Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, juxtaposing the solitary despair of ‘Lachen Verlent’ with the mythic symphonic grandeur of ‘Nyx’, inspired by the Greek deity of Night.  

WAYNE MCGREGOR’S PROGRAMME FOR VENICE BIENNALE DANZA 2025 TO BE ANNOUNCED IN APRIL 2025

Wayne McGregor has been reappointed as the Artistic Director of the Dance Department of La Biennale di Venezia for the two-year term 2025/2026, following his four-year tenure. McGregor, who was named Director of Venice Biennale Danza in 2021, will announce his programme for the 19th annual Festival of Contemporary Dance in April 2025. His debut programme, First Sense, focused on the importance of touch during a time in which the world was emerging from a prolonged period of pandemic-enforced isolation. For his second programme in July 2022, Boundary-Less, McGregor and his collaborators explored the limitless possibilities of creativity. For his third programme in July 2023, McGregor chose the theme Altered States, given the rapidly changing world in which we live. For his fourth programme in July 2024, We Humans, McGregor explored the very nature of what it is to be human, and the limitless possibilities of artistic collaboration and creation.     

“Unwrapping the great complexity, contradictions and mystery that is human life is a career pre-occupation for the movement creatives invited to Biennale Danza 2024. All the artists and companies this year adopt the medium of dance as a philosophical act of communication – testing the fundamentals of our knowledge, challenging our notions of reality, and extending the understanding of our existence. Through their work they invite us to question where we have come from and where we are we heading whilst probing the essential within, the what and the why of sentience.” – Wayne McGregor

AISOMA AT EDINBURGH FUTURES INSTITUTE

From the 13^th October – 17^th October 2024, Studio Wayne McGregor will deliver a creative residency culminating in a performance at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. The creative residency will centre on McGregor’s AISOMA – a world’s first, machine learning choreographic tool developed specifically for McGregor with Google Arts and Culture Lab. During the residency, 12 students from a range of dance backgrounds studying on MSc Dance Science & Education programme at Moray House School of Education and Sport, will be introduced to the AI tool, learn excerpts of McGregor’s AI repertory and use AISOMA to develop their own choreographic material, which Studio Wayne McGregor artists will then develop into a 20-minute public sharing performed by the dance artists.

STUDIO WAYNE MCGREGOR TO ANNOUCE RESIDENT 6 ARTISTS FOR 2025 IN JANUARY

In January 2025, Studio Wayne McGregor will unveil the six artists included in the second iteration of RESIDENT 6, its year-round artist residency programme for next-generation creatives pushing the boundaries of dance, movement and physical intelligence. Through a rigorous nomination and selection process, Studio Wayne McGregor will assemble a cohort of outstanding emerging artists whose practice, both individually and collectively, transcends the limits of contemporary dance, performance, and physical intelligence, and who will benefit from Studio Wayne McGregor’s focus on the body and the digital innovation at the heart of its network.

The RESIDENT 6 artists will each receive mentorship from Wayne McGregor, £5,000 in development funding, unprecedented access to Studio Wayne McGregor’s full spectrum of dedicated staff and spaces, and an unparalleled national network of creative and digital partners. The RESIDENT 6 programme will support these emerging artists’ goals and ambitions to make, research, experiment, collaborate and share work without limits, while catalysing fresh perspectives, new synergies and unexpected directions for the whole Studio Wayne McGregor community.

ABBA VOYAGE CONTINUES TO BOOK INTO 2025

ABBA Voyage, the revolutionary concert which launched the Swedish pop sensations back onto the stage in May 2022 for an outstanding virtual performance choreographed by Wayne McGregor and staged in a state-of-the-art, 3,000 capacity arena in Queen Elizabeth Park, continues to book throughout 2025.

Imagine: growing up in the North of England in the 70s and learning to ballroom, Latin and disco dance to the incredible songs of ABBA. I was 8 and I was totally transported. Fast forward to 2020, being in Sweden and dancing with ABBA — in real life! I was about to be 50 and I was totally transported again. That is the magic of ABBA. We have shared many creative and joyful adventures with a bold collaborative team to make the impossible possible for ABBA Voyage: technological wizardry, state of the art immersion and entertainment innovation. And still at its searing heart we simply have new songs, new moves, classic songs, classic moves: ABBA is DANCE and always will be. See you on the dancefloor!” – Wayne McGregor