Company Wayne McGregor

What does it mean to write your own life story?

Trailblazing choreographer and director Wayne McGregor has been radically redefining dance in the modern era with his own company, at The Royal Ballet where he has been Resident Choreographer since 2006, and internationally. He has an unmistakable visual style that pushes the body to ever greater virtuosity.

For 25 years McGregor has been making choreography that interrogates life through the experience of the body, moving intelligently in space and time. His practice is far-reaching and seeks out collaborators from a diverse range of artistic and scientific fields. Now, he turns his attention to the body as archive, with a work illuminated by the sequencing of his own genome.

Autobiography is a deeply personal show for the ten dancers of Company Wayne McGregor, with body-shaking electronic beats and immersive lighting, creating dance that is startling in its power and grandeur, yet bewitching in its nuances.

Collaborating with scientists from the Wellcome Trust, McGregor has sequenced his own genome, sampling the mass of data to determine the order of Autobiography’s spellbinding tableaux. Every performance of Autobiography is unique, an experience for dancers and audience alike that’s never again repeated.

Tackling profound themes of memory, ageing, sleep, past and future, Autobiography is mesmerising, multi-layered and mysteriously beautiful. It features original music from former steel mill worker Jlin colliding industrial sounds and gripping dance rhythms, dynamic set design and projection by Ben Cullen Williams, multi-layered costume design by Aitor Throup complementing the dramaturgy by writer Uzma Hameed, and stage-drenching lighting by award-winning designer Lucy Carter.