Wayne McGregor turns Margaret Atwood's bleakest fiction into a new Royal Ballet work on the Main Stage at Covent Garden.
Wayne McGregor, the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer since 2006, opens MADDADDAM, his new ballet after Margaret Atwood, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Monday 22 February 2027. The run continues to Saturday 13 March.
Atwood published the MaddAddam trilogy between 2003 and 2013. In it, a genetically engineered plague wipes out most of humanity, and a bioengineered species designed to be gentler than us survives. The handful of people left have to work out what they are for.
McGregor has spent his time at Covent Garden bringing ideas from outside ballet into a classical company. He works with scientists, uses technology as a collaborator rather than a backdrop, and has made ballets from Woolf, from Dante and from his own genome.
He also runs his own company alongside the Covent Garden post, which is how classical dancers end up working with people from outside ballet. Atwood’s engineered species suits a vocabulary built for that kind of work.
The run overlaps the Ashton programme in the same house. Within a fortnight the Main Stage carries Ashton’s wit and precision from the 1940s and McGregor’s post-human bodies, on the same dancers.