Woolf Works. Choreographic Work. Commissioned by The Royal Ballet.
- Submitting institution
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Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- McGregor1
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Royal Opera House
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first performance
- May
- Year of first performance
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This was a three-act ballet, in which I aimed to challenge ‘narrative’ dance as a form. Woolf’s own process to generate writing was rooted in embodiment- and a main research question was to explore further such interpenetrations between the expressivity of movement and text, echoing Woolf’s own literary and multidisciplinary preoccupations, and her search for a language subtle, dynamic and various enough to encompass the totality of modern experience.
Collaboratively, we envisioned a response to Woolf -a ‘collision of ideas’- giving opportunities for Woolfian juxtapositions or synaesthetic metaphors arising from the co-existence of different formal movement languages on stage, developing a new ‘platform’- a bank of ideas that used shared media. Importantly, these same resources were used in the studio to generate improvisations and task-based making processes. I wanted to deploy modernist literary writing techniques in novel movement generation, and compositional habit breakers.
I found ways of splintering Orlando into its disparate components and find equivalents for those in choreography and staging, relating to Woolf’s fascination with the idea of multiple selves, constructs of gender identity, and the vastness of the temporal span of her writing. In the studio, we were experimenting with literacy sources as a direct resource for movement making and compositional form. This was also my first time creating a large ballet from literary sources that responded both to the novels themselves, and the conventions of narrative ballet, forming a dialogue with dance history itself. Could we subvert tradition and offer an alternative kind of narrative long-form work? This led me to collaborate with a dramaturg for the first time.
Lastly, I was conscious of post-performance dissemination possibilities- and using the camera to share the phenomenon of kinaesthetic empathy, leading to experiments in volumetric capture and viewer-directed interfaces for live performance.
https://waynemcgregor.com/productions/woolf-works
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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