Wayne McGregor‘s The Dante Project was ready to go for its premiere in 2020. But then, of course, Covid hit. The dancers, who had programmed the three-act ballet into their muscle memory, suddenly had to keep the piece in a bodily limbo for a whole year. When it did eventually premiere, in October 2021, it received rave acclaim.

McGregor, who has been the Royal Ballet’s Resident Choreographer since 2006, is the mind behind Studio Wayne McGregor, one of the country’s leading dance companies. His most essential pieces include Chroma (2006), Infra (2008), Woolf Works (2015), and, of course, he choreographed ABBA for their virtual ABBA Voyage show in 2022.

The Dante Project, which is an interpretation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, features a score by Thomas Adés and designs by Tacita Dean. Currently, it is seeing its first revival at the Royal Opera House. We caught up with McGregor a couple of days after the revival opened and chatted about the ballet’s origins, his penchant for adapting literary works, and railing against the ballet traditionalists.

Barry Pierce: The Dante Project is back! How do you feel about it seeing its first revival at the Royal Opera House?
Wayne McGregor: Well, it’s strange, because this year we did it for the first time at the Paris Opera. We did 24 shows at the Garnier. And four weeks ago we opened at the Royal Danish Ballet at the Royal Theatre. So, there’s been a lot of Dante this year.

BP: I want to get into the background of the show. I actually saw it on opening night back in 2021 and it was just so brilliant. But I want to know why you decided to tackle such a huge and famous work?
WMG: Well, usually with me, as you know, I like to start with the collaborators. I had choreographed a few of Thomas Adés’ pieces before but I wanted to commission him to make a new, full-length piece. And you know composers, for a full-length piece it’s going to take about three or four years, so you have to start planning way in advance. So, we batted back and forth a couple of ideas and it was actually him who suggested doing The Divine Comedy. At first I was like, oh gosh, OK, we’ll see. But then I sort of thought my way into it. We had some good ideas about how we might work on the music. Then with Tacita Dean, who I had always wanted to work with (I actually originally asked her for Woolf Works), I thought The Divine Comedy would be a perfect project for her because it speaks to many of the ways she works in her practice. So it was the team that drove the idea, in a way.

BP: You have to have a certain fearlessness to tackle such a vast work. At what point do you realise that it’s actually going to work?
WMG: I mean, you don’t really know until it opens, when you put it before an audience and it is consumed. But when I’m reading something, I’m trying to think of the spaces between the words. I’m not thinking, how am I going to recreate this on stage? I’m trying to think about what a rendering of this would be, what might an equivalent be? If I can find equivalences, either emotional or textual or symbolic, I find a way in. That’s why I don’t worry so much. I mean, what would be the point of redoing The Divine Comedy? You’d never reach anywhere close to it and also, most of the people in the audience haven’t read it. I got a stupid review today from the Times, where the critic writes again that she hasn’t read The Divine Comedy so she doesn’t know if I’m conveying the story or not.

BP: I do worry about the people who go to ballet expecting… plot.
WMG: How could there ever be a plot? You watch Swan Lake you have no fucking idea what is going on. 

BP: Well, they try their best with those weird movements.
WMG: The mimes! [mimics the Swan Lake mimes] Actually one of those ballet blogs said that The Dante Project could benefit from more ballet mime!

BP: Nothing could benefit from that.
WMG: No ballet mime ever!

BP: You’ve worked with texts before. Obviously you did Woolf Works where you took three of Virginia Woolf’s novels, you’ve done the Margaret Atwood MaddAddam trilogy, and there’s the three books of the Divine Comedy. What draws you to those texts? Because they’re not something that you would traditionally see as being translatable into movement.
WMG: Part of it is to see if there is any contemporary relevance to the texts. Covid happened whilst we were preparing for The Dante Project so suddenly there was this urgency to the whole thing. With this project specifically, I think one of the beautiful things that Dante does in the poem is move from the literal to the abstract. You start with this hierarchical structure which is very formal, there’s a lot of little stories and it’s all very controlled, but then you can de-matter that through the Purgatory idea, blurring time and space. Then it all moves to pure abstraction because in Paradiso, Dante mentions that he cannot actually describe what he is seeing, so having something literal and concrete would be bizarre.

BP: This idea of having these three-act ballets is, dare I say, very classical of you.
WMG: I think there’s something really interesting about subverting the three-act tradition. I’ve been quite interested in this idea of taking what is quite a formal ballet tradition and just upending it. So that’s why I’ve been quite fascinated by that triptych idea. Some ballet audiences want a very linear progression, they want A plus B equals C. I’m just not interested in that. 

BP: Instead of fighting against the classical three-act structure, you’re seeing what you can draw from it.
WMG: And it’s funny because that pisses people off even more. The traditionalists, they are so averse to the fact that we’ve taken a classic triptych idea and not done what they think we should do. But I love that.

BP: Are you really still fighting against those Royal Ballet traditionalists after all these years at the Opera House?
WMG: Only because I would love people to open themselves. For them not to yearn for the things of the past, or the ways that we understood things in the past. All those classical ballets are beautiful, they’re incredible, but we don’t need to be making in their image. What is amazing about the audience that we had on the opening night of the revival was it was a really mixed diverse crowd. They’re not looking for classical, traditional storyline, they’re going for an event.

BP: Do you see a younger audience at the Royal Opera House now compared to when you joined in the mid-00s?
WMG: Oh yeah, it’s a completely different demographic. I mean, I think it’s still a challenge, lyric opera and ballet are still very expensive. It’s not like Paris. The 24 Dante shows in Paris completely sold out, but some of the tickets were ten euros, in really good seats. But France has a 40-whatever billion euro arts investment from the government and we have 500 million for the entire country. But I remember even when I did something like Carbon Life at Covent Garden, I think it was either the FT or the Telegraph that said I’ve got all my weird fashion acolytes in the building. Poisoning the space! [laughs]

BP: It’s funny that you mention your fashion acolytes because you have worked with a lot of notable fashion designers over the years. You worked with Daniel Lee recently, how was that?
WMG: I was thinking about Daniel originally when he was at Bottega Veneta and how he took this heritage brand and subverted the way that he worked but using the craft of the brand as the point of departure, which is kind of how I work in ballet. I’m taking this amazing classical language, which is a heritage language, and I’m trying to find a new resonance for it. I think Daniel did that amazingly well at Bottega. 

I am also fascinated with the super short form of fashion shows, where everything is packed into a couple of minutes. What I’m doing is this long, durational, type of show, which presents a whole new challenge for the designers. 

BP: So, you’re an incredibly busy man, what are you working on at the moment?
WMG: I’m doing a couple of things. I was just in New York because we’re doing Woolf Works at the Met in the summer. It’s the first time it’s in America and it’ll also be Alessandra Ferri’s very last shows. I’m working on project called Deepstaria, which is a big AI dance project that I’m doing with my company and will premiere at the Montpellier Festival in June. And then literally the next thing that I’m doing is directing Oedipus Rex, the Stravinski opera. We’ve commissioned a new Antigone from a young composer called Samy Moussa that’ll play straight after it as one event. We’re doing it with the Dutch National Opera and Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam. Oedipus has a chorus of fifty and ten dancers and Antigone has a female chorus of fifty with dancers too so it’s this huge, epic, massive opera. 

BP: You never make things easy for yourself, Wayne.
WMG: I don’t wanna be bored! I mean, what else would I do?

The Dante Project runs at the Royal Opera House until December 2nd.