Tree of Codes

Olafur Eliasson, artiste dano-islandais à la réputation internationale, signait en 2017 sa première collaboration avec le chorégraphe Wayne McGregor en créant pour le ballet Tree of Codes un décor déjouant perspective et perception. Retour sur le travail d’un artiste total.    

From the very first minutes of the performance, the artist’s conception of the scenography is clearly perceptible: in a space plunged into total obscurity, the dancers evolving on stage are equipped with luminous white dots placed over their joints, reminiscent of the white stripes that the doctor and physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey sewed onto black leotards, (they also moved against a black background) with the aim of analysing the structure of movement. His “chronophotographic” images, as they were called, were to serve as references, around 1912, the period at which abstract art was born, both for Marcel Duchamp in his Nu descendant l’escalier n^o 2 and for the futurist Giacomo Balla and his vibrant Compenetrazioni iridescenti. Beginning Tree of Codes in this way illustrates Eliasson’s structuralist thinking. This abstraction – one could almost say extraction – of the natural appearance of the dancers, dressed in primary colours, gives rise to an agitated and luminous nebulousness. In the same way, the dancers' bodies which become clearly visible as the performance continues and the stage lighting illuminates them, are seen in a mise en abime, multiplied in space by a series of reflections.

In this vast modernist project of decompartmentalizing the Fine Arts and opening them up to the real time and space of perception, Eliasson’s proposition is not so much to give birth to an object or an image but to explore the instability and inconstancy of our perception. Indeed, the framework established by the artist is that of free choreography, not really based on text. Eliasson’s adaptation to the logic of a dance production was primordial. For the bodies concerned here are no longer those of visitors to one of his exhibitions, but of professionals executing a precisely orchestrated choreography. However, and this is a detail of considerable importance, audiences to Tree of Codes, whilst sitting comfortably in their seats, find their attention, in the course of the performance, directed in an erratic manner by a spotlight which then projects their image onto the back of the stage, creating the fleeting impression that they are situated there. “My work is based on the involvement of the audience” when “there is an inversion of the subject and the object,” explains the artist, “ the spectator becomes the object, the environment becomes the subject.” Eliasson questions spatial parameters, the limits of the pre-existing stage. In the same way, he does not dismiss Bertolt Brecht’s idea of “ shattering the theatrical illusion” in as far as one of the essential tools of the scenography of Tree of Codes is undisguised illusion, produced by lighting effects and the use of one-way mirrors. The illusion is therefore explicit; it makes no attempt to disguise itself and is thus absolved of any intention to manipulate.

Although sober, the scenic space conceived by the artist proves to be intrinsically disjointed and fragmented, at least as it is represented on the retina

once projected by the material object. Defying all spatio-visual limitations, it is reminiscent of the works of Swiss artist Christian Megert, as well as his manifesto Ein Neuer Raum (1962), in which he stated his desire to construct, with the aid of angled, mobile and dislocated mirrors, one-way mirrors and neon lights, a “space with neither beginning, nor end, nor boundaries” which would be simultaneously “immobile and in movement”. Similarly, the stage structure is not the result of any high-tech procedure, and all Eliasson’s mirrors, which render the spatial position of the dancers constantly uncertain, are for the most part able to pivot on their own axes. They are sectioned into half-circles or radii and reflect rays of light sporadically from their various meeting points. This successive “sectioning” of the performance space has considerable impact on the spatio-temporal unity of the work and on the thresholds of perception; tangible reality, such as it is presented here, constantly oscillates between proximity and distance, plenitude and vacuity, transparency and opacity – such a procedure proving so much the more significant in that it resonates with the initial act of the author of the book Tree of Codes: Jonathan Safran Foer fashioned his own text in the same way, cutting up the pages of Bruno Schulz’s book, The Street of Crocodiles. Eliminating entire sentences, Foer brought new ones into being, in a complex interplay of correspondences, of transparency and opacity, between both the narrative structures and the physical lay-out of the different pages.

For Tree of Codes, Eliasson takes up the idea that the most radical form of abstraction, that is to say, that which clearly breaks away from pictorial image, has sometimes been conceived by artists and their patrons as a veritable backdrop, or, in other words, as a decorative background – summoning up the human figure (painted or sculpted), that central image of so-called figurative painting. For if the latter has naturally been excluded from abstract art, it re-emerges in the living form of the spectator or dancer, both of whom are challenged in the habitual exercise of perception. Such a scenographic realisation fully reflects Eliasson’s singular preoccupations and thus pursues (because “one creates nothing, one only pursues”, as Henri Matisse reminds us) a particular type of abstraction that enjoyed considerable development during the 60s and 70s in a movement known as Cinétisme, optical art or perceptual art. This aesthetic sensibility, founded on participation and phenomenology, found its most striking expression in the work of certain artists, whose influence Eliasson has many times laid claim to, like Jesús Rafael Soto, Heinz Mack, Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Francisco Sobrino, François Morellet and Christian Megert. Having themselves drawn on constructivism, the teachings of the Bauhaus, cognitive science and information theory, and collaborated with stage directors and choreographers, they have given birth to veritable machines of vision, as receptive and reactive as the spectator himself, providing, of course, that the latter consents to step through the looking-glass.    

Matthieu Poirier est historien de l’art. Il a écrit sa thèse de doctorat sur l’art optique et cinétique (Université Paris-Sorbonne). Il fut à ce titre commissaire de l’exposition « Dynamo » aux Galeries nationales du Grand Palais en 2013.

A choreographer, an artist and a composer of electronic music have created a work inspired by a book, itself based on another book. That’s a pitch that hardly shines out for clarity, but rather for its ramifications. Commissioned from Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson and Jamie xx and first performed at the Manchester International Festival*, Tree of Codes was inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer's eponymous sculpture/book adapted from The Street of Crocodiles, an anthology by Polish author Bruno Schulz, by cutting up the pages and eliminating certain words. This project, first presented in 2017 at the Palais Garnier, is back at the Opera Bastille from June 26 to July 13 2019. A unique opportunity to (re)experience a new and grandiose facet of Jamie xx's sound world.

When, in 2011, he released the album, We are New Here, Jamie xx already enjoyed considerable acclaim – that same year, the xx's eponymous album, released in 2009, was certified platinum. The rhythm boxes, the post-punk side of this minimalist pop trio (at that time a quartet), are down to him. Producer of the xx and instrumentalist, Jamie Smith made a startling solo debut when he remixed the album by the monumental Gil-Scott Heron I’m New Here. Jamie xx embellishes the phrasing of that pioneer of Spoken Word, to whom we owe The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, with tones of electronica and post-dubstep. Perhaps it was listening to that unexpected, ambitious and successful collaboration that incited the Manchester International Festival, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Wayne McGregor Studio to invite Smith, alongside choreographer Wayne McGregor and artist Olafur Eliasson, to take part in the Tree of Codes adventure.

“I didn’t know anything about ballet before this,” declared the composer in 2015 to the British daily newspaper The Independent. “I get a lot of random offers from people, but this one was exciting. Everyone was super into it and super enthusiastic about it.” Jamie xx was already familiar with the work of Eliasson: this Icelandic artist is one of only a few people to have occupied the gigantic Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, where his Weather Project illuminated the space with the burning light of a huge sun; his work can also be seen in art collections all over the world. Although he met Wayne McGregor and was a party to the choreographic research of the dancers, Smith claims to have been greatly inspired by the book Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘It’s the form more than the content of the book that interested me. This book really grabbed me.”

From artists as diverse as Paul Simon and Gloria Gaynor, Jamie xx’s first album abounded in citations borrowed and worked into his own compositions; in his second album released in 2015, In Colours, this procedure becomes even more prevalent, with refrains from Idris Muhammad’s Could Heaven Ever Be Like This (1977) and Good Times by The Persuasions (1972) actually becoming the principle themes in two numbers, Loud Places and I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times) - a procedure reminiscent of Foer’s chopped up phrases obtained by extracting certain words from the original text by Bruno Schulz. For Tree of Codes, it was songs by Mickey Newbury and Patrick Cassidy that provided Smith’s musical construction materials.

But Jamie Smith doesn’t content himself with reworking other people’s songs; in several pieces, notably his hit-song I’ll Be There For You, Romy Madley Croft of the xx is on vocals. For this original project, the composer called on the singer Okay Kaya. Her lyrical timbre, like the arrangements by the quartet Iskra Strings that we hear in certain passages of Tree of Codes, remind us that, in spite of his modernity, Smith has been weaving links with the classical opera repertoire. “ I have been able to create pieces that I would never have recorded on an album,” he writes.

Technology, a theme dear to Wayne McGregor, is also present in Jamie xx’s sound track, whether in the form of synthesisers and rhythm boxes borrowed from House or Techno, whose beat sometimes makes the stage resemble a night club, or in the very process by which the Londoner composed his music. In an interview granted to The Creators Project, McGregor explains: “Jamie thought of a way of building an algo-rhythmic programme that in some way played the pages [of Tree of Codes], and gave him a base-line in terms of rhythm that he could then work on top of […] and write melody from.” Half way between emotion and abstraction, the music of Tree of Codes is inseparable from the scenography and the dance, which explains why it has not been released on CD. The presentation of this project until February 23^rd at the Palais Garnier is a unique opportunity to experience a new and grandiose facet of the sound world of Jamie xx.    

Tree of Codes, created at the Opera in 2017, has its roots in Jonathan Safran Foer's novel of the same name, itself inspired by Bruno Schulz's The Street Of Crocodiles. The latter comes to life thanks to Yannick Haenel's pen, offering a dialogue at the crossroads of a classical repertoire and contemporary creation.

The revelation came to me one evening in a jazz club in Brussels. I used to go there every Friday after working all week at the École des Arts Visuels de La Cambre. I liked to go around 7pm, after my class, well before the start of the concert. That way, I could unwind with one of the single-malt whiskies the club was famous for and enjoy the beauty of a place which had the restful shape of a jewel-case — a jewel-case of night-time velvet (burgundy red, bottle green) — a spherical jewel-case whose soft curves evoked a small Italian-style theatre with a balcony upstairs where my table was located, and from where I would never stop gazing at the two mysterious green steel chrome pillars rising up out of the centre of the club.

Lazlo and Bettina wouldn’t be long to follow, Generally, they arrived around 8 pm at which point we immediately ordered our favourite cocktails: a Rabid Dog for Lazlo, a Femme Fatale for Bettina, and for me a Georges Simenon (a rather smoky vodka and grapefruit).

They too taught at La Cambre: Bettina was an architect, and Lazlo an artist, and each Friday we liked to take stock of our classes and assess the expectations of our students and the demands that pushed us to find new ways to pass on our passions.

That September, I had just started teaching a rather unusual, somewhat heterodox class called “A History of the Forgotten Books of the 20^th Century”. I defended the notion that prominent books merely formed a screen behind which other books deemed to be minor actually contributed to the true history of literature, which in my view falls within the realms of secrecy. These books did not endure enforced oblivion, they themselves had programmed it: they incorporated it in order to benefit from that secret dimension in which a genuine work continues to develop after it has been written. I postulated that each of these books had carefully concealed a revelation in their sentences; and it was the very existence of that revelation that made these books literature and sometimes great literature. No secrecy, I would tell my students, no literature — no revelation, no book.

And so I had already devoted several hours with them studying I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasienski, The Captain by Roberto Bazlen, The Encyclopaedia of the Dead by Danilo Kis, Livres des pirates by Michel Robic, Petersburg by Andreï Biely; and that very day I had started talking to them about The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

And so a minor literary heresy developed, which initially surprised my students, who were more accustomed to the names of great authors rather than the names of outsiders. Nevertheless, they seemed to appreciate it: ultimately, what I was hoping for was that they would adhere to the conspiracy, that each of them would participate in this counter-history, and in a way become part of the secret.

I was eager to discuss it with Lazlo and Bettina: Bruno Schulz’s book lent itself perfectly to the kind of speculations that they—and I—loved. Indeed, through the character of his father, who in the book plays the role of a prophet of Israel, the Polish writer developed a new theory of Genesis: the creation of the world was repeated in a family in a small town in Poland, according to exuberant laws which, by referring to the Bible also perverted it.

I like theories; I like to look for the things in books which, supposedly, are not there (but what else is there in books other than correspondences, allusions, and signs?). I like to think that books can speak across time—that they can rewrite each other: Thus, Schulz rewrites Kafka, who rewrites Kierkegaard, who like Kafka and Schulz, never ceases to rewrite the Bible, and more particularly the sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham.

Thus, in the so-called minor book —The Street of Crocodiles—behind the shop windows of the Street of Crocodiles, I was sure that Kafka, twenty years earlier, had called for a “new kabbala”, that’s to say a new sacred scripture capable of showing the hidden structure of the world and rekindling the passion of the word.

I could already imagine with a certain amount of pleasure Lazlo and Bettina’s surprise, as well as their reservations: They would never allow themselves to be carried along so easily. The evening promised to be fun.

With a smile on my lips, I gazed at the two large green pillars and started to daydream: It was impossible they had been erected in the middle of the auditorium by some architectural blunder: they were so imposing that they inevitably followed some schema. And then, due to the shimmering (because the upper floor of the club was covered with mirrors that would reflect the iridescent light from the ground floor), those two pillars seemed to distort and twist on themselves like the spiralled columns that Bernini sculpted for the baldachin of Saint-Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

I was about to order a second cocktail from the waiter after he walked over to my table, however, instead of taking my glass, he sat himself down in the leather armchair opposite me.

— Why are you studying Bruno Schulz ? he asked me.

I didn’t have time to respond:

— From the Creation of the world up until to the Warsaw Ghetto, he added, the position of the gaps was continually communicated by rite, sacrifice, and prayer; yet with the Shoah, the transmission of the gaps was broken.

— What gaps? I asked.

He did not reply to my question. I could barely distinguish the features on his face: he was sitting with his back to the light and in the club’s subdued luminescence, he remained in the shadows. And yet, at the same time, by framing his silhouette the two pillars seemed to wreath him in a halo. It even came to mind in a rather strange way, that his presence emanated from the space between the pillars.

— The Shoah did not interrupt the process, he continued: it is the process which, in a manner of speaking, profited from the Shoah to slow down. This is why it is now essential that the words continue to make their way along “parallel paths of time”, as Bruno Schulz called them. The word passes through the gaps, and those gaps are henceforth communicated by literature, poetry, and novels. Have you read Tree of codes by Jonathan Safran Foer?

Once again, I didn’t have time to answer: the young man continued his monologue without giving me so much as a thought.

— Jonathan Safran Foer understood that books must be read by opening the window in them. That window is adjusted to the secret the book carries within it, that is to say, the memory which frames its sentences. How far do you manage to see when you read?

I wanted to answer, but he seemed to be talking without even seeing me.

— A real book creates a breach in language: it burrows a hole in time, it crosses the centuries until it becomes contemporaneous with the acts of God. In a true book, regardless of the story being told, we witness the birth of light, the sky and the oceans. That’s why Jonathan Safran Foer cut up the sentences in The Street of Crocodiles with scissors: by creating gaps in the book, he rediscovered the window that looked onto Genesis.

I then noticed that a book had been placed next to my glass on the little table between us.

— Bruno Schulz’s words open onto primitive times just as a porthole looks out onto the sea. You know that Noah cut a window in the Ark: it was to release the dove; to see the Earth rise out of the water. Well, that window is still open: it penetrates the spirit, it digs a tunnel through the books — it makes the centuries communicate with each other. If you analyse a sentence and look inside each word, you will see time passing through itself since the beginning of the world.

Suddenly, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of joy and I began to laugh. A laugh enlightened by the obvious. It seemed to me that I had never known that window: I had spent my life looking inside each word; and what I saw there — what I was able to distinguish through the books of Bruno Schulz, but also Danilo Kis, Roberto Bazlen, and Andreï Biély was the bold, bluish light shining onto the Ark.

The waiter handed me my second Georges Simenon. I took it and glanced at the two pillars glittering green against the gold colours of the club: they now looked like the two columns of the Temple of Jerusalem.

I downed my vodka-grapefruit in one go. I continued to smile. The light flooding through the space between the pillars dazzled me; and in place of the young man whose silhouette had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, there was a book—a book that seemed so fragile that at first I didn’t dare move my hand towards it.

It was a strange volume: reminiscent of the body of a bird. I picked it up gently. It weighed practically nothing. A book of feathers I thought; a book full of air — a book with wings.

It was Tree of Codes: Bruno Schulz’s book cut up by Jonathan Safran Foer.

When I opened the volume, I saw the gaps. I saw the windows. Safran Foer had kept just a few words on each page, and they seemed to float like mobiles against a blank page.

It made me think of Mallarmé's poem A Throw of the Dice which hurls its words into the sky to create a new constellation in the heavens. But here, each word opened onto another word, and a story immediately took form randomly across the pages. A story that made the most of the giddiness created by the gaps. And while I conscientiously began to decipher the narrative offered by the paper-lace book by trying to reconstitute a rudimentary story with the few words of the text that Safran Foer had kept, I suddenly realised that instead of reading the sentences, I was reading the empty space. Seeing between the phrases, moving between the pages, passing through the windows.

And there, whether because of an excess of Georges Simenons, or the fatigue at the end of a long workweek, or the bewitching light from the Temple of Jerusalem shining specially for me between the two green pillars of the club, I began to see, as the strange young man had said I would.

Turning the pages of Tree of Codes, I saw a desert, a knife, a throat slit open in a flash by a blade, and the hand of the person holding the knife. I saw the sand, the stones, and springs appear with the bluish hue of the Ark. I saw mountains dotted with olive trees, the first blades of ocean-soaked grass and sleeping deer, giraffes, and panthers. I drew closer and saw the burning pelt of the panthers, the eyelids of the giraffes, and then the fine down covering the thighs of Eve. I saw horses snorting in the meadows, and streams winding through forests. I saw dried blood on the walls of caves, fire on faces, blood, seaweed, laughter. Suddenly, everything seemed to dance, pelts, knife, legs, rivers… And the light carried me into eternity. 

Yannick Haenel

First created in 2017 at the Palais Garnier, Tree of Codes, the ballet by Olafur Eliasson, Jamie xx and Wayne McGregor, returns, this time to the Opéra Bastille, from June 26 to July 13. Once again, a plethora of unexplored perceptions await spectators. A tireless researcher and ardent defender of dance ever in motion, Wayne McGregor continues to explore innovative choreographic languages, at the crossroads of the visual arts, scientific technology and ever more creative creation. A portrait.

All choreographers have a personal style. But it would be hard not to recognise a ballet by the British choreographer Wayne McGregor – those sleek, hyper-extended distortions, the extreme articulation of the body, the unexpected twists and turns of movement. Dancers in his works, whatever the theme, look stunningly beautiful and disorientatingly strange. They are recognisably human and also bodies from another world.

His interests are as wide as his extension of the choreographic vocabulary. He has made purely abstract works, pieces that take on complex scientific concepts, a ballet about the nature of modern warfare and one about the writings of Virginia Woolf. Just look at the range of work he has choreographed for Paris Opera Ballet. L’Anatomie De La Sensation, his first creation for the company in 2011, was inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon; Genus found its own origins in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species; Alea Sands was a tribute to the music and the principles of chance used by Pierre Boulez.

Tree of Codes which brings together the dancers of the Opera with those of Wayne McGregor Company was prompted by a book by Jonathan Safran Foer that took his favourite work – Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles – and literally carved out a new book, by cutting holes in the paper to highlight individual words and phrases and reveal new meanings.

Not a single McGregor piece – not even the fable Raven Girl, his first narrative ballet - takes you anywhere near the fairy tales, legends and myths or even the pure interest in physical form that inspire so many choreographers. For him, concept is all. “I’m always amazed by people who say they want to make choreography but they don’t have an idea,” he once said. “I find that weird. For me, it’s about motivating yourself to find something interesting that will engross you and make you change the way you think about the world. That’s why we do what we do.”

That remark gives a clue to the impetus behind his entire career. He is a man driven by a desire to explore. He does this both through his rigorous adaptation of dance vocabulary, but also through collaborating with other artists from other spheres, who provide nourishment for his always-active imagination yet who allow him to fulfil his singular vision.

The first step, the initial mark on the canvas, though, comes from him. Kevin O’Hare, director of the Royal Ballet where McGregor has been resident choreographer for the past 10 years, noted: “When Wayne puts a ballet on stage, what you see in the end is what he imagined in the beginning. He is always thinking deeply about what he wants to do with a particular piece to make it work.” This is something McGregor himself explains in a different way. “The choreography is not something separate,” he says. “I know what the world will be, what the music will sound like. These function like my script, or like a toolbox for me to play with. So I am partly engineering the choreography with those ideas in my mind – and partly looking for the opportunities that arise when unexpected stuff happens. “   

From the beginning, McGregor has been different. Born in 1970, he grew up in Stockport, an industrial city in the North of England not noted for its dance culture, in “an utterly stable, utterly normal home”. His early influences were disco and the movement of John Travolta – “his pure physicality, the rawness of that body, the ease and effortlessness.” He excelled in ballroom and Latin American dance and told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs that his first teacher had a formative influence on him when she let him make up variations of the rumba or another heritage dance and then noted his version. “They were the touchpoints for choreography,” he said.

He also studied classical music, however - he is one of the very few choreographers who can actually read a musical score – and his career started with a first class degree in dance from Leeds University and jobs in community dance. That combination of the theoretical – the degree – and the intensely practical – getting people involved – honed both his originality and his powerful enthusiasm for the communicative power of movement. He pushes an audience into new territory, just as much as he drives himself.

In 1992, he founded his own company Random Dance (which has now grown into Studio Wayne McGregor) and began to make work characterised by his own spiky qualities as a dancer. Shaven-headed, tall and extremely flexible he was in the words of one critic “capable of dazzling switch and swivel.” By 2001, his company was resident at London’s dance house, Sadler’s Wells, and Nemesis, his first work there, attached long, steel proboscises (made by Henson’s Creature Shop) to the dancers’ arms, turning them into subterranean creatures in a dystopian world.

John Ashford former director of The Place once said: “Wayne is the most inquisitive man I know”, and his work is proof of that curiosity. In AtaXia, premiered at Sadler’s Wells in 2002, he unveiled the results of six months research on the workings of the brain, sending his dancers into spasms of apparently uncontrolled, flailing movement. In 2005’s Amu it was the heart that was the organ under examination. Working with a score inspired by the composer John Tavener’s own heart condition, McGregor watched open-heart surgery (he fainted), and studied the poetry of Sufi mystics to produce a piece that tackled both the heart’s emotions and workings.

That interest in science has found other manifestations too. In 2004, he was appointed Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University and many of his subsequent works have either overtly investigated cognitive experiments or used new research developments to underpin an ongoing interest in the relationship between movement and the science of the brain.    

McGregor’s work for his own company is often his most adventurous, but his career and thinking has been immensely enriched by his collaborations with different companies. His close association with ballet began in 2006 when the Royal Ballet premiered Chroma. It was a sensation. Behind the headlines about “Acid House at the Opera House” and “punk in the Garden” was a real frisson at the thrilling effect of the collision of McGregor’s new ways of thinking and bodies that had been ballet-trained in the most traditional manner.

When he accepted the post of resident choreographer, following in the illustrious footsteps of Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, it was an appointment that shocked some traditionalists, and criticism of McGregor’s work for the Royal Ballet has never entirely been silenced. Yet Kevin O’Hare is insistent that it has been a boon for the company.

“Some people were shocked that such a role would go to an outsider someone who had not come up through the company itself,” he explained. “But I was very excited by the idea, along with the rest of the company, and felt that it was taking the Royal Ballet in the right direction. It was important to have a contemporary choreographer like him on the inside, working with the dancers and pushing them onwards. And the dancers themselves were ready for that sort of challenge. There was quite a whoop around the house when the notice announcing his appointment went out; it was a surprise but they absolutely welcomed it.”

Since then McGregor has expanded his work as a freelance for a wide range of international dance companies, including POB, La Scala, Nederlands Dans Theater, San Francisco Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, New York City Ballet and Australian Ballet. He has also been movement director on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and, more recently, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and The Legend of Tarzan. He once arrived for a day in rehearsal at the Opera House after a morning observing apes at London Zoo.    

He works incredibly hard, with commitment and energy. In rehearsal with dancers, he is an inspiring figure, full of crackling energy, swooping around the studio making an assortment of sounds and using a variety of images to explain what he wants and needs. “He has a way of making the dancers part of the creation,” O’Hare explained. “His work isn’t improvised, it’s clearly directed, but he says, “here is the material, now let’s work out how this step can follow that step”. He stands back from it a little and asks the dancers to collaborate with him. Some people find it hard, obviously, but others eat it up and can’t wait to get their brains and their bodies around the work. His choreography engages everything.”

That sense of the possibility of dance, the way it involves both mind and body in a continual exploration of content and form, drives McGregor ever onwards. His career keeps developing and growing. The recent success of 2015’s Woolf Works, a three-act ballet based on Virginia Woolf’s writing which he created without sacrificing any of his exploratory instincts, made him feel that lyric ballet theatres are – finally – ready to embrace new ideas. “It felt like a tipping point,” he said. Placing his dancers alongside those from Paris Opera Ballet was another sign of that sense of two worlds coming together. “It is nice for my company to have a new energy. But it also shows the way that ballet companies like the Royal and POB are starting to work in different ways. I don’t think it is just me who is changing. There is a definite shift.”

McGregor’s interest in pushing the envelope, represented in works like Tree of Codes, is part of his belief in making dance speak the language of today. “We live in complex times. Our art forms should reflect the need to decipher meanings and find new synergies. It’s not for everyone and that’s fine, but it is absolutely what we should be doing.”