A space between

Wayne McGregor, a resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet, is no stranger to transforming literature into movement: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves inspired his three-act ballet Woolf Works (2015), while Inferno served as the foundation for his 2021 production The Dante Project. In his latest literary interpretation McGregor seems to have found one of his most fitting pieces of source material to date.

First performed by the National Ballet of Canada in Toronto in 2022, McGregor’s MADDADDAM made its European premiere in London last week, performed by the Royal Ballet. The production is a response to Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of the same name – a complex dystopian epic that envisions a world ravaged by genetic engineering and ecological collapse following a man-made plague. Given his career-long explorations of the interplay between science, technology and the human condition, it’s a natural fit for McGregor. It’s also an incredibly timely story to share with audiences: you could argue that, like the characters in Atwood’s books, we are all living through the aftermath of a plague, bombarded daily with news of environmental crisis and the creation of non-human intelligences.

The ever-thinning line between dystopia and reality is made clear in Act I of MADDADDAM. As it opens, all too familiar scenes of burning cars and buildings, as well as balaclava-wearing protestors armed with baseball bats, are projected onto a semi-transparent curtain covering the stage. Behind it emerge a cast of characters in futuristic costumes designed by Gareth Pugh, who manipulate each other in a series of slow-motion lifts and leg extensions.

Individuals are singled out as the act progresses. Among others we meet the flannel-short-wearing Snowman/Jimmy (Joseph Sissens), who believes himself to be the last human being alive, as well as Crake (William Bracewell), Snowman’s former best friend, who engineered the new, peaceful race of “Crakers” that now populates the earth. To choral notes in Max Richter’s original score, the Crakers pop their bodies in odd isolations. Dressed in blue and white catsuits, their faces are obscured, drawing attention to their quirky movement language and firmly establishing them as non-human.

Oryx (Fumi Kaneko) is the romantic interest who unites these characters in a complex love triangle. In a standout duet, Crake supports Oryx in graceful balances and rotations – and sometimes more playful jumps and kicks – caressing her face before the pair lie down together, with Snowman watching despairingly from the sidelines. However, understanding the significance of this tangled relationship, as well as the roles and storylines of other cast members, is immensely challenging. The intermittent appearances of “pigoons”, bizarre hybrid animals created through genetic splicing, which crawl primate-like across the stage, must also be particularly perplexing for those without prior knowledge of Atwood’s original text.

Dance doesn’t necessarily have to convey all the details of a narrative, and literature can be used as a jumping-off point rather than a script to be followed. Yet Act I of MADDADDAM frustratingly occupies a space between abstraction and linear storytelling: too grounded in plot to be purely evocative, too ambiguous to be chronologically coherent. A voiceover by Tilda Swinton offers some, but not enough, explanation of the complex narrative threads – an element that has been added since the ballet’s premiere in Canada. While it was presumably introduced to make the work more accessible to Atwood novices, its inclusion keeps the focus on comprehension of, rather than immersion in, the atmospheric worlds McGregor creates on stage.

Acts II and III, however, are increasingly thematic and visceral. The former takes “extinctathon”, a trivia-style computer game that Snowman and Crake played as children, in which the players must identify and answer questions about extinct species, as a point of departure. In McGregor’s hands the game becomes a danced metaphor for the gamification of survival. Performers swipe, cut and slice their limbs in time with an industrial, electronic score, creating a rich, rapid yet organized chaos in the process. This is McGregor’s signature movement style at its best – rooted in familiar balletic vocabulary, yet distorted by off-kilter hips and undulating torsos. Action is punctuated by brief pauses when certain “players” drop to the ground and green, pixelated, CRT-style text projections declare them extinct. “Survivors reset” flashes up on screen at the end of the act, a poignant moment illustrating the unrelenting forward motion of life. In times of dire, dystopian difficulty, there is little time to mourn the lost – only the need to push forward, to reset and keep surviving.

The final act of MADDADDAM propels audiences even further into the future, focusing on the race of Crakers. As flawed, jealous, destructive humans are now extinct, they appear to be living in harmony. In birdlike flocks they run bent-backed in sweeping curves across the stage, and assemble in rippling, anemone-like clumps. Set to an inspirational soundscape that could come straight from a nature documentary, the scene offers a fleeting moment of hope that, despite the apocalyptic nature of what has preceded it, utopia is still possible. That is, until the Crakers brand flaming torches and assemble objects to form minimalist puppets of Oryx, Crake and Snowman. Manipulating them to act out the events of the past two acts, the Crakers seemingly view their forebears as deities to be worshipped, rather than characters from a horrific history that they have managed to survive.

While other moments in MADDADDAM are perplexing, Wayne McGregor’s final message couldn’t be clearer. Humans – and, it seems, Crakers – will never evolve beyond the creation of dogmas, religions and ideologies, or our inability to learn from the past. In the final scene a child Craker stands centre stage, wearing a piercing red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. Again? Which “again” does this child want to go back to? Who and what will become “extinct” in the process?

Emily May is a Berlin-based writer and editor specializing in dance and performance. She writes for publications including Dance Magazine, ArtReview, frieze and the Stage

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