Studio Wayne McGregor

Coro
2025

Concept, Direction and Choreography
Wayne McGregor

Company 
Company Wayne McGregor and Biennale College

Dancers
Company Wayne McGregor: Rebecca Bassett-Graham, Salvatore De Simone, Chia-Yu Hsu, Jayla O'Connell, Jasiah Marshall, Mariano Zamora González, Kevin Beyer, Izzac Carroll, Julia Costa, Po-Lin Tunge

Biennale College: Cathy Grealish, Asja Marabotti, Francesco Catalfamo, Stella Perniceni, Kannen Glanz, Alice Del Frate, Ivan Merino Gaspar, Luca Cappai, Angelo Zizzi, Ming-Chin Hsieh

Music
Luciano Berio

Lighting
Theresa Baumgartner

Orchestra and Choir
Filarmonica della Fenice

Premiere date and venue
10 December 2025, Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Italy

A new choreographic staging of Luciano Berio’s Coro

Company Wayne McGregor × La Biennale di Venezia × Teatro La Fenice

To mark the 100th anniversary of Luciano Berio’s birth, Company Wayne McGregor premieres a bold new choreographic staging of one of the 20th century’s most visionary musical works - Coro - in a co-production with Biennale Danza, Fondazione Teatro La Fenice, and the Orchestra Filarmonica della Fenice, with the contribution of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Composed between 1974 and 1976, Coro is Berio’s monumental work for forty voices and forty instruments, which received its Italian premiere at the Biennale Teatro and Biennale Musica directed by Luca Ronconi in 1976. Nearly fifty years later, it returns to Venice in a new large-scale staging that concludes La Biennale di Venezia’s Special Projects of the Historical Archive, uniting music and dance in tribute to one of Italy’s greatest composers.

For this world premiere at the historic Teatro La Fenice on 6 and 7 December,  Wayne McGregor brings together twenty dancers - ten from Company Wayne McGregor and ten selected from the Biennale College over the past five years - alongside the forty voices of the Coro della Cattedrale di Siena “Guido Chigi Saracini” and the forty musicians of the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice.

Long fascinated by Berio’s work, McGregor describes Coro as “sophisticated, eerily beautiful, and viscerally physical - perfect for dance.” While Sinfonia remains Berio’s most performed composition, Coro is perhaps his most defining: a synthesis of voices and instruments, literature and folklore, structure and spontaneity. Deeply inspired by global folk traditions, it interlaces international texts and songs through Berio’s kaleidoscopic compositional language. The composer himself described Coro as a kind of “Invisible City,” referencing Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities - a favourite of both Berio and McGregor.

The production is a celebration and rediscovery: a daring, multi-dimensional homage that reimagines Berio’s masterwork for a new century - a living architecture of sound, movement, and human connection.

Image: Wayne McGregor's Coro, Company Wayne McGregor and Biennale College Dancers, Venice (2025), Photo credit Andrea Avezzù, Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia