Wayne McGregor's spirit of experiment

He is celebrated as one of the most imaginative choreographers in world ballet, twisting the bodies of pliant dancers into thrilling new shapes and forms. But Wayne McGregor started his professional career in humbler circumstances - organising tea dances for the locals in east London. "It was my very first job," he tells me in his dressing room at the Royal Opera House, and you cannot help but smile, wondering if any of the radical reinterpretations of human movement for which he has become famous made their way into those traditionally sedate affairs.

They didn't, McGregor swiftly disabuses me. In return for his community work, he says, he was also allowed to start making his own pieces, and that is where his flights of kinaesthetic fantasy took off. But since those days in the early 1990s, he has run two careers in parallel, dividing his creative energy between local educational work and high-end choreography. The two paths have fed each other, he says.

"A lot of my earliest experiences were in educational projects, directing 100 bodies in one go. And that came in very useful later in life, dealing with opera choruses and the like."

Now those twin strands of McGregor's professional life are coming together again, right where they started. Next year his company, Wayne McGregor Random Dance, will become the first arts organisation to move into Here East, the creative centre in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. McGregor describes the huge new space ("imagine the [50-storey] Canary Wharf tower laid on its side") as a meeting place of business, technology, media and education.

"It is an amazing hotbed of resources," he enthuses. "This is a technologically literate building, and it is very exciting to be not in an arts environment but mixing with people outside the arts altogether - neuroscientists, technologists, sports scientists." Sharing knowledge and insights with his neighbours is what most attracts him to the project. "I never wanted a £25m iconic building to ourselves," he says.

McGregor has form in mashing up improbably aligned disciplines. Through his work with the company, now 23 years old, he has been a pioneer in exploiting the links between his art, and the scientific developments that have revolutionised 21st-century life. They were displayed at the Wellcome Collection in a 2013 exhibition, Thinking with the Body, which pushed dance and movement into entirely new areas.

McGregor is noted not just for an insatiable experimental spirit but also his success in transforming that curiosity into box office magic: his best-known works, such as Chroma, Infra, Entity and Atomos, are established parts of the modern ballet repertoire. The Royal Opera House was quick in recognising McGregor's gift for reconciling ambition with accessibility, appointing him resident choreographer in 2006, while his company has concurrently been in residence at Sadler's Wells.

But the fresh move to a permanent home in the Olympic Park visibly fires him up. He speaks at hyper-speed, and with great fluency, on the opportunities that have opened up for his work, and its outreach programme. The atmosphere of mixing with other "makers" - of candles, bread, technologies, new forms of code - will galvanise the company, he believes. "Many of our passions are aligned in this building," he says.

Most tellingly, for those who believe in the social legacy of the London Olympics, McGregor is not forgetting his roots. He seems proudest of all of the company's FreeSpace programme, which will provide blocks of studio space and time, free of charge, to artists and companies for rehearsal. In return, they will be asked ("asked, not required," says McGregor, in the nicest possible way) to devote one day out of every week of their stay to community and education work. "I'm open to all kinds of projects," he says when I ask him what type of work he envisages in the new spaces. "I'm interested in people doing interesting things, but you don't always know what that is until they have had the opportunity to develop them. What is important is that they buy into that vision, of giving something back."

Both the space itself - which will be configured in "random" ways rather than sticking to prescribed formats - and the ethos of the studio should prove inspirational to aspiring choreographers, says McGregor. "It could be a really beautiful way of seeing what is possible," he adds.

Technology will inevitably feature heavily in his experiments. He reels off examples, such as PlayStation games and biometric bands, which could prove fruitful ground for his researches into how the human body works, and further shape his radical choreography. He has already co-operated with a company that uses biometric bands to measure the state of adrenalin and arousal in the body. "That could be used in a really creative, rather than quantitative, way," he imagines.

Dance is no mere art form in McGregor's eyes but a catalyst for the encouragement of original thinking. "We are not here to be didactic, but to open channels of curiosity. It is about training the brain to think about the world in a different way. My passion has always been getting art into education."

I ask him if dance audiences are ready for the results of his experiments, and he pauses and pinches his face, ever so slightly. "I think it is context dependent. The audience here at Covent Garden is different from the audience at Sadler's Wells. London is different from Paris. My aspiration is that people come to a performance with open filters. And that is very hard. People say they come with an open mind but, actually, they are looking to collate evidence in support of something they already know."

Working with eight-year-olds, he says, he notices they have no problem with watching abstract movements, and giving multiple interpretations of what they are seeing. "But as they get older, they stop asking, 'What do I see?' and think more about 'What does it mean?' " He makes a brief return to his own childhood. "I used to do country dancing when I was four or five. What was interesting about that is that you did have the opportunity to touch people, feel their body weight, negotiate space around the maypole. We do that less and less as we get older."

Not the least of McGregor's achievements has been in harnessing the results of his researches into a nominally conservative dance audience such as the one at Covent Garden. Next month sees his first full-length ballet at the Royal Opera House, Woolf Works, a homage to the novels of Virginia Woolf that will not, surprise of surprises, take any kind of traditional narrative route.

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The production marks the return to the house of Alessandra Ferri, the Italian dancer who was a star of the house in the 1980s, and who retired in 2007. "She is in amazing shape physically, and it is super-exciting for the company," says McGregor. The ballet will be a "reimagining of the way we think about heritage," he adds.

"Ballet is not a fixed form, it is a contemporary art form which should be in constant evolution," he urges. The views of balletomanes, who have not always responded positively to his work, are "interesting", he says, much as one would describe one's first taste of monkey's brains. But he knows he is leaving them far behind. What he hankers after is the intellectual debate that can take place between traditional ballet and the kind of work he is promoting. "It is what you get in the visual arts, it is very ideas-based, and I love it."

The dance world at large is succumbing to him. Chroma, he tells me proudly, has been performed in 11 countries, and was acclaimed at Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, where "the dancers went for it voraciously, and so did the audiences, and all the old coaches". I ask him if he ever worries about the box office when he is devising a new work. "Perhaps I would if people didn't come to see the shows," he replies instantly. "But if you put an interesting subject together with interesting music, they will want to come. And that takes care of it."

'Woolf Works', Royal Opera House, London, May 11-26, roh.org.uk

Photographs: Anne Deniau; Prokofyev Vyacheslav/ ITAR-TASS Photo/ Corbis

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