– At the end of the day, we’re all chemistry

“One of the great things about how we human beings communicate with one another, is that we do that through our bodies.” 

He gesticulates as he says it. Gently, but engaged. A literal embodiment. 

“Most of our communication now in this interview happens through the way in which we sit. I can tell from watching you what you’re thinking about my answers – perhaps even what your next question will be. We have a kind of empathy through our bodies. And theatre – opera, dance, orchestral works – choreographic objects do this very beautifully. That's what we're aiming for.” 

The last time world choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor went to Oslo was in 2020. The Norwegian National Ballet managed one performance of his award-winning Chroma before the Opera had to close due to the pandemic. Now, in a Bjørvika heading into the year's first autumn month, a world premiere is in the making. This time, dancers, singers, and musicians will all be put to the test. 

“Jocasta’s Line is a choreographic project – not a dance project per se. By that I mean we're constantly looking at the interrelationships between mediums, McGregor explains. – So, we’re looking sometimes at music and dance, sometimes at singing and dance, but we’re as likely to be looking at singing and light, or dance and object.We’re thinking about this whole work as one epic choreographic choreographic work intergrating multiple mediums.”

What McGregor is creating in Jocasta's Line has a hybridity that challenges how we perceive the nature of the work. 

“What we’ve been learning to do is kind of excavating the textual, the visual and the sonic language of these works”, he says. “You build with the amazing images, both visual and acoustic, and also what I like to call kinesthetic images – images that the body just knows.” 

The maverick of ballet 

After 34 years as a choreographer and director, with more than 180 works on his resume, he is still equally fascinated. Perhaps it's the unstoppable interest in the human body as a sensory apparatus that makes Wayne McGregor continually push new boundaries – within an art form many consider traditional. 

But what McGregor creates is anything but that. Certainly, he is resident choreographer at The Royal Ballet in London for the last 20 years – the first with a background in contemporary dance, mind you. But time and again he finds new ways to unite ballet with science, new technology, pop music, art and architecture. 

A maverick of the ballet world, he is often called. His own Studio Wayne McGregor has become a creative melting pot for physical intelligence, and since 2021 he has been Director of the Dance Department at the Venice Biennale. 

And although dance is always the starting point, his work branches out into other genres and art forms. He has been movement director for several Harry Potter films. He has taught Thom Yorke of Radiohead to dance, and he has worked with names like Olafur Eliasson and The White Stripes. He has choreographed the avatar concert ABBA Voyage in London, a smash hit seen by millions. And he has collaborated with anthropologists, scientists and software engineers. 

For if we are to believe Wayne McGregor, choreography is everywhere among us. 

A conversation between past and future 

The idea for Jocasta's Line arose about seven years ago. McGregor was working with the Stravinsky pieces The Rite of Spring and Les Noces for American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera and the ballet company of Teatro alla Scala in Milan. 

" Both of these works were performed sequentially as one evening, a conceptual whole. This framework became a beautiful way to hold the music and choreography. And it gave me a clue how we might approach Oedipus Rex and a partner piece”, he tells us. 

Fast forward to 2025. In the rehearsal rooms of the Oslo Opera House, Stravinsky's monumental oratorio resounds from the walls. Originally, Oedipus Rex was composed as a gift to art critic, impresario and Les Ballets Russes founder Diaghilev. 

“It was first performed together with The Firebird, so already in its original form in1927 there was a kind of combination of opera, opera-oratorio and ballet, McGregor says. – That put us on the track of continuing the story of Oedipus and creating a completely new Antigone.” 

This is not the first time he dives into Greek myths. In 2019 he staged Orpheus and Eurydice at English National Opera – and this year he gave the dance programme at the Venice Biennale the theme of Myth Makers. 

“I noticed around the world that many artists were returning to classical myths and evolving fresh ways of reinterpreting them or creating new speculative myths of their own that look forward in time. This concept of moving backwards and forwards in time simultaneously felt like a potent theme for the Venice Biennale Danza 25”, he explains. 

What is it about these myths that resonate with us today? 

"I think myths offer us universal truths; they offer us a one-removed way of being able to understand the world. They allow us to zoom out and think about the bigger picture. They allow us to stop thinking about ourselves and everything about “me” and rather think about “us”. Myths emerge over times. You can’t proclaim a new myth is a myth in contemporary times – obviously, it’s in retrospect we can say something is mythical. But I think art makers have always been the ones to challenge our perceptions about the way in which we live and think - they have reflected us back at us in startling and original ways and in doing so many artists work have generated a kind of mythology in their own terms.” 

In a world more turbulent and polarized than it has been for a long time, challengers feel absolutely necessary. 

“I think it's especially important now, in a political situation where very often voices are being sublimated, freedoms of speech are being restricted. In the arts too we are being squeezed out of every big conversation – political, technological, economic, educational – the arts seem to have a small voice", McGregor says. "That is strange to me, because of course, art making is also a process of innovation and collaboration. That diversion thinking is about learning to have dialogue with people who think differently from you. We look at the world through broader lenses. And I think those skills are extremely valuable – not just in art, but in life itself." 

Two punches to the gut 

For Jocasta's Line, McGregor and his team commissioned a new work from British Canadian composer Samy Moussa – an Antigone for female voices, as a contrast to the male voices in Oedipus Rex. 

"Oedipus Rex is a very visceral work, written for men – we have 42 voices in Oslo. There's real force – it's a piece that not only emotionally but viscerally hits you in the gut”, McGregor says. "It's interesting to have a conversation with this almost hundred-year-old work through a new work composed today, with a contemporary sensibility. 

Stravinsky's masterpiece has a narrator who explains to the audience what they are about to see. In McGregor's version, he does this in English. 

“Your imagination is primed in advance, you hear the story directly from the narrator before it is sung in Latin ", he explains. "For Stravinsky, this has two functions. It slightly distances you from the action imbuing the work with a monumental grace but critically it makes you attend differently to the music – the quality of your listening to the sonic colours of the music is given space, untethered from the literalism of words and their meaning.” 

In Antigone, McGregor wanted to create an impressionistic response to the narrative and avoid a literal approach. And since Antigone was to be led by dance – and dance, according to McGregor, does best the ambiguous – something fluid, ephemeral, a contemporary fever dream felt right. 

“Dance as an art form is very slippery, it’s more akin to a concert than it is a play”, he means. “Dance stimulates our sensorial system, this amazing sensory instrument we have, namely the human body. We often feel before we know. The somatic before the cognitive. Samy has created his own unique response to the Antigone story – an amazing score which is otherworldly, strange, not of this time. It has a huge emotional impact too –– it has a different kind of punch in the gut.” 

Jocasta’s Line 

At the centre of the performance stands Jocasta – the connective thread between the two tragedies. She is Antigone's mother, but also her grandmother. Married to Oedipus, but also his mother. 

"This is a deep and dramatic moment in someone's family tree and DNA, isn't it?” McGregor has to smile. "The promotional image for the performance shows Jocasta and this dendritic structure, with tree branches and roots that reach out into a blood-soaked environment.” 

For him, Jocasta is the very pivot point of the story – the source of it all.

“She is the central connector in this work – we are exploring her blood line – Jocasta's Line.

Everything drives us back to this incredibly complex and profound character.

But how we experience her is not through literal explanations, but through a felt sense of her and her familial relationships.” 

When talking about the sensory, McGregor lights up. 

“When you’re at home and you’re moving to music, what you do is just dance. You don’t see a picture in your head. You’re not working with your visual system thinking about how or what to move. The sound bypasses all of that and goes directly to the movement sense – the kinaesthetic. You dance. But when we go to the theatre, so often we expect the literal, the cognitive to be the primary source of our understanding – after all, the job of the brain is to make meanings from things.” 

Stravinsky's stroke of genius in this 1920s work, he believes, is showing that there exists a possibility to explain something with text but then inviting us to forget the words. 

“It’s about that primed imagination. You just receive the music through your body. And that instinctive sense is something really exciting. You’re not reading the subtitles, you’re not consciously thinking about the words – you’re feeling the meaning. I feel you can come to this work particularly and let the senses wash over you. In the beginning, the work is presented formally, as Stravinsky intended – stonelike. But as we experience the works progression it starts to become more like water.” 

Or as Jean Cocteau, who wrote the libretto for Oedipus Rex, would say: Science-made flesh.  

“I love that we have the capacity as human beings to go through all these sensory systems and work out how we feel about something”, McGregor says. 

A dialogue between forms 

He keeps speaking about a 'we'. There are many who make up the sonic body in Jocasta's Line. And the work takes shape here and now. 

“For me, the purpose of making work is about inventing in real time together”, McGregor tells. “I’m offering a point of departure from which we are developing a shared language with and through the whole team on and off the stage. This process is not without risk, you are inventing daily, there is a lot of change and transformation. But it’s a beautiful thing when a group of people think collectively about an idea. And it’s their collective intelligence that shapes it. In the end, we find the way together.” 

One challenge in choreographing and directing for both dancers and opera singers simultaneously, he says, is balancing different types of specialism.  

“It's simply different to walk into a dance studio, where the collective intelligence is primarily physical. The dancers are able to assimilate all kinds of ideas through and with the body. In a singers' room, their primary channel is the voice. An interesting challenge is: how can we extend those possibilities without robbing one of the specialisms of the other?" 

McGregor and his team have explored the disciplines in various ways – sometimes working in concert, sometimes breathing separately. 

“We have also tried to experiment with a continuum of motion from stillness to an explosive physicality – much in the same way the composers have in the scores”, he says. 

“It’s like a conversation! Certain ideas our brought to our attention, coming to the fore, we build on them and then allow something else to come forward while that initial idea slips away, blurry now in the background and ready next to appear in another form. It’s a dialogue between forms and certainly not all forms happening all of the time. 

McGregor speaks warmly about his artistic team: Vicky Mortimer is the set and costume designer and Lucy Carter lighting designer, they have collaborated with one another for over thirty years. Filmmaker Akhila Krishnan is a new collaborator, and has seamlessly joined the team – "fantastic" he says. 

“Choreography is as much a design process as it is a dance process. When we’re designing together, we work out how to use our mediums as a holistic choreographic body. That’s something we’ve been interested in for decades.” 

British superstar actor Ben Whishaw, is the Narrator's voice in Oedipus Rex. 

“Ben has this amazing ability to communicate effortlessly – he has a vocal contemporary ease that allows him to speak Shakespeare, Beckett or Cocteau in a direct, personal and inviting way. We were thrilled when he agreed to be the filmed 'mouth' and voice of our Narrator.” 

The cast of singers is also star-studded: British mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and American tenor Paul Appleby bring Jokaste and Oedipus Rex to life. Two conductors alternate leading the Opera Orchestra: Belgian Koen Kessels, known for his work with The Royal Ballet in London and the Dutch National Ballet, and French-Italian Charlotte Politi, a rising star on the European opera scene. 

When doors open 

Wayne McGregor has a body of work that surpasses most others. Where do all the ideas come from? 

“What does it mean to be inspired by something? In my case, the answer is that it could be anything. It’s that moment when you are faced with something you perhaps have never experienced before – and there’s a chemical change in you. There’s a feeling that a door opens. You feel you want to do more of it, know more about it, try more of it.” 

Therefore, believes McGregor, access to art and culture is crucial. 

“When you have that moment of inspiration, you need champions around you to help support it”, he says. “That’s why it is really important with education programmes, outreach programmes, clubs, the way we actually encourage arts in schools. You have to swoop them up and give them the opportunity to try and express that. When you have that spark of inspiration, it’s our responsibility – our collective responsibility – to keep it alight. 

He himself was supported by his parents. His path to dance began at school in Stockport, with English folk dance, and continued at the local dance club. But what he remembers best is seeing John Travolta in Grease and Saturday Night Fever. He was inspired immediately. 

"In the same way that generations later were inspired by Billy Elliot or So You Think You Can Dance”, he adds. “It doesn’t really matter what that access point is. 

At the end of the day, we are all chemistry, says Wayne McGregor. With Jocasta's Line he invites us to let our senses wash over us. Then we can experience for ourselves the chemical change that happens when body meets music, when past meets future, when dance is written into myths.