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Tonight at Covent Garden,
a collision of dance,

literature, music and design

as the life and writings of Virginia
Woolf provide the inspiration

for the Royal Ballet's resident
choreographer Wayne McGregor.

This production played
to sell-out audiences

in 2015 and went on to win McGregor

both the Critics' Circle Award
for Best Classical Choreography

and the Olivier Award
for Best New Dance Production.

Why Virginia Woolf?

Well, I think she really reinvented
the way in which you read a novel.

Nobody writes quite like Woolf.

Everything you see is vivid
and heightened and full of colour

and full of feeling.

Language is really almost
like a research tool for her

to probe into what it means
to be a person.

The combination
of the power in her work

and the fragility in her
humanity really touches me.

Last year, Wayne celebrated
his tenth anniversary

as the resident choreographer
at the Royal Ballet,

a decade that has seen him create
a diverse body of works.

Virginia Woolf is one of our
best-known English writers

and an icon of modernism.

She was born in 1882 into a
privileged, intellectually curious

yet essentially Victorian family,

and strove in her work
to find literary forms

appropriate for the new realities
of the 20th century,

producing nine novels along
with a raft of essays, journals

and letters.

Three of her novels are directly
referenced tonight.

The first part of the ballet, which
Wayne has entitled I Now, I Then,

invokes the themes and
characters of Mrs Dalloway.

In the second part, Becomings,
Wayne draws on her novel Orlando,

with its gender-fluid central
character hurtling through time.

And finally, in Tuesday, Woolf's
novel The Waves is at the fore,

a work about which she said,

"I'm writing to a rhythm
and not to a plot."

Alongside the literary works,

Wayne McGregor has also incorporated
elements of Virginia Woolf's

own life, from her thoughts
on writing and language

to her circle of friends
and her lovers,

as well as her struggles
with mental illness,

which culminated in her suicide
by drowning at the age of 59.

She absolutely loved dance,
she loved music.

She wanted to write as
if she were writing music

and as if she were
kind of choreographing dance.

And I just thought it would be
a wonderful thing to try and

reinterpret those, or
translate those novels

into something for the stage.

It's an investigation into these
texts, into her biography,

into her life, via the medium of
these disparate artforms, you know,

music, dance, movement, video,
scenography, costume, lighting.

It's a wonderful investigation,
a wonderful laboratory into that.

We hear all this stuff about
Virginia Woolf as being suicidal

and mentally ill and tragic and all
of these things but, actually,

when she was talking about writing
and she was talking about her work,

she knew what she was doing.

All the dance really should happen
here on these pages. It's just

that actually it's
how you get there.

We had to boil the three
novels right down to what we felt

was their essence,

and amplify everything that needed
to be there to convey that feeling

in the most direct,
immediate and pure kind of way.

Mrs Dalloway is a beautiful
story about people.

It's about human relationships.

It's a woven textured story which
is full of imagination and pain

and beauty.

Orlando is this romp
through 300 years of history,

and as Woolf was super interested
in science fiction, in astronomy

and things other, it's really
suited my kind of alien aesthetic.

And then the third piece, The Waves,
is partly her letters and biography

colliding with this phenomenal
story about growing older

and letting go, in a way.

I think we first had the idea
for the Woolf project around 2012.

In our case, we were
into the studio in 2015.

'On the very first day
when we went into Woolf Works,

'it was more of a
workshop environment'

and we were just exploring
movement, space,

'the music.'

'I find it freeing.

'I find it wonderful to have
something made for you.'

I'm sure it's like getting something
tailored specifically for you.

Wayne's language, and Wayne's way
of connecting a movement to music,

it has a unique grammar.
It's very, very exciting

to sort of witness how he
then interprets what's going on.

That's always very striking.
That movement.

Then, yeah, if you could just
work out your alignments quicker

so you can get through a
little bit quicker, I think that

would be really good, yeah.

He's extremely particular
about what he wants.

He likes you to explore
your characters.

He likes you to explore
the movement to its maximum.

He knows exactly in what
direction's everybody's going in,

and is a master
on knowing the shapes

and the patterns of
what he wants on stage.

He loves the fact that everybody
just embraces the space.

'What I love to see is offering
something to an amazing dancer,

'them to give me something
back and me to recognise'

that I could never have
thought of that on my own.

'That's why casting
is really important.'

He said to me, "I need soul.
I need the soul of Virginia Woolf."

'I realised that I really could work
with this man, who comes from a very

'different environment, different
world of dance than I was used to.

'We could develop a connection,'

if he approached the work
with a soul in mind.

'Mrs Dalloway was my age,
she was a woman in her 50s.

'But then in her memory,
she was a teenager.'

But so am I! And so is everyone.

You know, we all have
our life inside of us.

'Woolf is never just
one thing, and actually

'if she had the possibilities that
we have of staging, for example,

'having multiple characters
on stage at the same time,

'being able to look into different
people's psychological reality'

at the same time,
would she be doing one story?

Or would she rather not be doing
something that is far less

story-led, and much more
about finding different voices

and giving different experiences?

When I read Woolf, that's
what I get over and over again -

her absolute brilliance
about being able to describe

and to hold on to this really
varied and multidimensional lives

that we all lead.

Well, the ballet starts with
the only surviving recording

of the voice of Virginia Woolf.

We glimpse Woolf the writer
before she disappears

among her characters, and the themes
of Mrs Dalloway come to life.

VOICE OF VIRGINIA WOOLF: 'Words,
English words, are full of echoes,

'memories, of associations,
naturally.

'They've been out and about,
on people's lips,

'in their houses, in the streets, in
the fields, for so many centuries.

'And that is one of the chief
difficulties in writing them today.

'They are stored with other
meanings, with other memories,

'and they have contracted so many
famous marriages in the past.

'The splendid word "incarnadine,"
for example. Who can use that

'without remembering
"multitudinous seas"?

'In the old days, of course,
when English was a new language,

'writers could invent
new words and use them.

'Nowadays, it's easy enough
to invent new words.

'They spring to the lips
whenever we see a new sight

'or feel a new sensation.

'But we cannot use them because
the English language is old.

'You cannot use a brand-new word
in an old language

'because of the very obvious
yet always mysterious fact

'that a word is not a
single and separate entity.

'It is part of other words.

'Indeed, it is not a word
until it is part of a sentence.

'Words belong to each other,
although, of course,

'only a great writer knows that
the word "incarnadine"

'belongs to "multitudinous seas"...'

MUSIC

CLOCK STRIKES

HORSE AND CART

CLOCK TICKS

HORSE AND CART CONTINUES

CHATTING AND LAUGHTER

CLOCK TICKS

SOUNDS CRESCENDO THEN STOP

MUSIC

APPLAUSE

I Now, I Then,

part one of Woolf Works from
the Royal Opera House in London.

Last year Wayne McGregor
celebrated his tenth anniversary

as the resident choreographer
at the Royal Ballet.

Over that time he has
created a huge body of work

and collaborated with a
genuinely dazzling array of people

from neuroscientists to novelists,
architects to animators.

And I'm very pleased to welcome him.

Wayne, thank you for coming to
join us. Hello. It's extraordinary.

I can't believe ten years
has passed. I know, so fast.

Oh, what is it about the
Royal Ballet dancers that keep

inspiring you?
Well, they're just incredible.

I mean, everybody has their own
kind of physical signature,

their own handwriting.

But these dancers have just got
such phenomenal technique

and emotional intensity,

and, you know, increasingly amazing
imaginative and creative skills.

And it's just a pleasure
to work with them every day.

And the dancers are very
willing, as well, aren't they?

So willing, they're so open, yeah.

And also when we're making,
we're coauthoring material.

It's not just, I'm standing at the
front telling dancers what to do.

We're really working
on projects together,

and over these last ten years
we've really developed

a kind of a shorthand
with many of those dancers.

And then you see all this young
generation who are even more

technical, have even more kind
of creative ideas, all raring to go.

Yeah, it's really wonderful.

So you do give quite
a lot of material

to the dancers to work with.
I do, yeah.

Your process is fascinating,
cos I have seen you in action.

I think it's partly something
to do, first of all,

with the quick transaction
of energy. If I provoke you

and you move in a particular way,
something happens.

I love to do that. Sometimes
I might come in and make
something with my own body

and give it to a dancer.
Sometimes I might work with

the two of you here, and try
and construct something...

That'd be the dream! ..and construct
something together... Please!

..and sometimes I just set an idea
off and we all work it out together.

We ask a question of the body, and
the body kind of solves a problem,

and something interesting comes out.
It's those combinations of things.

Choreographers work in
so many different ways.

That's the wonderful thing about
being a choreographer -

is difference, is this idea of
everybody finding

their own kind of physical way

of inspiring others
and inspiring themselves,

and I think that diversity in dance
is really incredible.

I love being part of that.

One of the wonderful things about
this ballet is that it gives a sense

of the sheer range of your
choreography. Very briefly,

if you may, would you
just tell us something

to look out for in the next act?

Well, I guess this next act is
more a kind of a rollercoaster

of physicality, so the job here in a
way is to push the body to do things

that have never perhaps been done
before, or at least to push them

in a way that is really
kind of extraordinary.

The body is misbehaving.
And I love that,

because in so many ways
Virginia Woolf misbehaved.

She didn't follow
convention in writing,

and this kind of trip through 300
years, you see it in a kind of...

..a misbehaving way. It's like
an adrenaline bullet, really.

Well, nobody delivers adrenaline
bullets like Wayne McGregor.

Thank you so much for being with us
and for this beautiful,

beautiful ballet. Thanks.
Well, it's not long before

we will be immersing ourselves
in the world of Woolf Works again.

The astonishing soundscape
that the ballet occupies is,

as we've just heard, the creation
of the composer Max Richter.

He's one of Wayne's long-time
collaborators,

and a few days ago he came into
a studio here at Covent Garden

to give us an insight into
his compositional process.

One of the most striking things
about Virginia Woolf, I think,

is her creative work
is very sensory.

It's about sound and texture
and feeling and colour and tempo.

There's something very
inspiring about that, actually.

The music, to begin with,
with Miss Dalloway

grows out of nothing.
You have this very simple...

..little fragment which grows...

..over time...

And it just turns into a continual
line of quavers. Very asymmetrical.

And then other musics at
different speeds surround it.

It's almost like pulling of focus.

There is also a kind of a theme
which is a very simple

sort of long-note theme which
actually comes over the top

of this rippling line of quavers.

It's a very, very simple,
a sort of minimal little line

which happens there, but also
happens in different forms

in different movements
of the first act.

It's sort of encountering something

that you don't know where you've
heard it. That's the idea of it.

And I think that's really
one of the magic aspects

of the novel for me, this idea
of meeting things across time.

The second act of the ballet,
I use a ground base.

A ground base is
a repeating baseline.

In today's language we would call
it a loop, but in fact it's a

structural principle which goes
back to the 16th century at least.

Earlier, probably. La Folia is a
very well-known example of that.

It's this, everyone recognises...

HE PLAYS LA FOLIA
BY ARCANGELO CORELLI

Yeah? So we all know that tune,
don't we? So that's La Folia.

And it struck me that the structure
of Orlando,

with this extraordinary journey
spanning hundreds of years,

changing gender, doing
all sorts of travelling,

themes of transformation, it really
lent itself to a variation form.

In the simplest Orlando variation,
it's almost like

sort of putting grit in
the oyster to make the pearl.

You know, so in that variation,
this very simple...

..becomes...

So it's sort of right,

but it's also sort of wrong.

You know, for most of us
that sort of...

It makes you go... "Oh..."

You know. Cos we know
how it should go, but...

..there's something
a bit wrong with that.

So it sort of invites participation.

It's recognisable,
but subtly altered.

And that's really what's going
on in Orlando a lot of the time.

The music for Tuesday
is all structured

around the principle of a wave.

We start with this...almost
like an empty space.

You know, it's just...

moving very, very slowly.

So that...is an up-down movement,
you know?

That's what it does, it goes up
and down. It's like a wave.

And then it's joined by a
faster-moving line

which also goes up and down.

And then

more and more density
of waves moving up and down

at different speeds.

If we look in the score,
we can see these things.

Even visually, you can see
it quite clearly.

There's that sort of wave movement.

If we imagine that...stave there...

You've got this very
high line doing this

quite slowly...

..like that.

And then the next line...

..is sort of like this.

And then more density
and more speed...

..is built up while the
music sort of develops.

So you get all these interference
patterns, and all of this

is underpinned with this
big ground base

which is a sort of...

It's almost a sort of cosmic
background radiation

which holds the harmonic field of
this really large, long extended

piece together in a way which
hopefully feels inevitable.

That's really what I'm looking for.

Now, the second part of the ballet
is called Becomings,

and it's Wayne McGregor's response
to the novel Orlando,

first published in 1928
when it caused a huge scandal.

The book, subtitled A Biography,

features a protagonist who changes
sex from man to woman

and travels through three
centuries of English history.

Becomings features designs by
the architectural practice We Not I,

with costumes by Moritz Junge

and lighting and lasers
by Lucy Carter,

which we should probably warn you
does create some strobe effects.

It's time now to head to
the auditorium for Becomings,

the second part of
Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works.

MUSIC

PEN SCRATCHES ON PAPER

SCRATCHING CONTINUES

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Becomings,

part two of Wayne McGregor's Woolf
Works from the Royal Opera House.

Well, wasn't that extraordinary?

I mean, you heard the response
there from the audience. Yes!

Well, after that, the final part
of Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works,

Tuesday, takes its inspiration
from Virginia Woolf's eighth novel,

The Waves, which she
described as a play poem.

It follows the lives of six
characters in parallel

from childhood through to old age.

Tuesday also features elements
of Virginia Woolf's own biography

set against a vast video
projection by Ravi Deepres.

We're going to hear something
really special now -

some of Virginia Woolf's
writing in a series of extracts

from her poetic novel The Waves

and from her autobiographical
fragment Sketch Of The Past.

The selections were made
by dramaturg Uzma Hameed

and are read here for us
by the one and only Maggie Smith.

If life has a base
that it stands upon,

if it is a bowl that
one fills and fills and fills,

then my bowl, without a doubt,
stands upon this memory.

It is of lying half asleep,
half awake...

..in a bed in the nursery
at St Ives.

It is of hearing the waves breaking,

one, two...one, two...

..and sending a splash of
water over the beach.

And then breaking...

one, two...one, two...

..behind a yellow blind.

It is of hearing the blind
draw its little acorn

across the floor
as the wind blew the blind out.

It is of lying and hearing this
splash and seeing this light...

..and feeling it is almost
impossible that I should be here,

of feeling the purist ecstasy
I can conceive.

We launch out now
over the precipice.

Beneath us by the lights
of the herring fleet,

the cliffs vanish...

rippling small, rippling grey,
innumerable waves

spread underneath us.

I touch nothing.

I see nothing.

We may sink and settle on the waves.

The sea will drum in my ears.

The white petals will be
darkened with sea water.

They will float for
a moment and then sink.

Rolling me over the waves
will shoulder me under.

Everything falls in a tremendous
shower, dissolving me.

"Tuesday.

"Dearest...

"..I feel certain
that I'm going mad again.

"I feel we can't go through
another of those terrible times.

"And I shan't recover this time.

"I begin to hear voices...

"..and I can't concentrate.

"So I am doing what seems
the best thing to do.

"You have given me
the greatest possible happiness.

"You have been in every way
all that anyone could be.

"I don't think two people
could have been happier...

"..till this terrible disease came.

"I can't fight any longer.

"I know that I am
spoiling your life.

"But without me, you could work.

"And you will, I know.

"You see, I can't
even write this properly.

"I can't read.

"What I want to say is, I owe all
the happiness of my life to you.

"You have been entirely patient
with me, and incredibly good.

"I want to say that.

"Everybody knows it.

"If anybody could have saved me,
it would have been you.

"Everything has gone for me
but the certainty of your goodness.

"I can't go on spoiling
your life any longer.

"I don't think two people could have
been happier than we have been.

"V."

MUSIC

APPLAUSE

CHEERING

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING CONTINUE
THROUGHOUT CURTAIN CALL