Woolf Works

Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works is the most celebrated of all The Royal Ballet's contemporary commissions — a three-part work that draws on three novels by Virginia Woolf to create a meditation on consciousness, time, identity and the nature of the self. Created in 2015 with a score specially composed by Max Richter and designs by Ciguë (sets), Moritz Junge (costumes) and Lucy Carter (lighting), the ballet won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in 2016 and has entered the permanent repertoire of The Royal Ballet as a defining work of the McGregor era.

Each section of the triptych corresponds to a different Woolf novel and explores a different mode of being in the world. I Now I (based on The Waves) opens in a blinding white light, exploring the multiplicity of self and the way consciousness flows between states — its movement language quick, mercurial and exhilaratingly unresolved. Becomings (based on Orlando) takes its cue from Woolf's fantastical gender-crossing novel and creates a lush, romantic pas de deux landscape of transformation and desire, time expanding and contracting across centuries. Tuesday (based on Mrs Dalloway) takes its title from the day of Clarissa Dalloway's party but also from the day Woolf walked into the River Ouse, and is the most explicitly elegiac of the three sections — a dark and searching reflection on consciousness approaching its own ending.

McGregor's choreography across all three parts is characteristically hyper-articulate: bodies pushed into extreme ranges of motion, the spine used as an expressive instrument, speed and control deployed with extraordinary precision. Richter's score is both deeply musical and intensely cinematic, including recorded passages of Woolf's own voice. The result is a ballet unlike any other in the repertoire — deeply intelligent, physically extraordinary, and emotionally unlike anything else on the stage.