"I want people to feel like they're living inside Atwood's novels": A Q&A with Maddaddam choreograph

[demmiblue]

“I want people to feel like they’re living inside Atwood’s novels”: A Q&A with Maddaddam choreographer, Wayne McGregor

This November 23, the National Ballet of Canada celebrates the world premiere of Wayne McGregor’s MaddAddam, inspired by Margaret Atwood’s namesake trilogy of dystopian novels. At the helm is McGregor: a British superstar choreographer who has created ballets based on the works of other literary heavyweights, including Virginia Woolf and Dante Alighieri.

Atwood’s trilogy is prescient, set in a near future run by tyrannical corporations and blighted by climate change, ravaged further by a global virus that wipes out most of humanity. The large cast of characters range from biotech geniuses and sex workers to a hippie-like community of rooftop gardeners. Not to mention the novels’ non-human inhabitants, both the freakish animal hybrids spawned by genetic meddling, and the beautifully eerie humanoids known as the Children of Crake.

McGregor’s MaddAddam is a co-production between the National Ballet of Canada and the U.K.’s Royal Ballet. And while the companies have collaborated extensively in the past, this marks the first show to have its world premiere in Toronto over London. To create it, McGregor has re-assembled the team behind his acclaimed Woolf Works, while adding a new collaborator—Atwood herself.

Here, McGregor talks about collaborating with a monumental figure like Atwood, why Toronto was essential to his vision, and the wonderfully weird exercise of designing anatomically correct humans of the future.

https://torontolife.com/city/theres-a-lot-of-toronto-at-the-heart-of-it-a-qa-with-maddaddam-choreographer-wayne-mcgregor/

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[MuseRider]

1. WOW!

I loved that series. I think I have read them at all at least twice. Pigoons! YES!

Thanks.