Wayne McGregor's MADDADDAM runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden, 22 February to 13 March 2027.
Margaret Atwood published the MaddAddam trilogy between 2003 and 2013: a genetically engineered plague wipes out most of humanity, a bioengineered species designed to be gentler than us survives, and the handful of people left have to work out what they are for. It is the bleakest and funniest thing she has written, and the least obviously danceable.
Wayne McGregor has been the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer since 2006 and has spent that time proving that a classical company can carry ideas from outside it. 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. Atwood is the logical next argument. He also runs his own company alongside the Covent Garden post, which is how the classical dancers end up working with people from outside ballet altogether, and Atwood’s engineered species is the sort of problem his choreographic vocabulary was built for.
MADDADDAM runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Monday 22 February to Saturday 13 March 2027. It overlaps the Ashton programme in the same house, so within a fortnight the Main Stage carries the company’s oldest choreographic voice and its newest — Ashton’s wit and precision made in the 1940s, McGregor’s post-human bodies made now, on the same dancers, who have to do both.