Studio Wayne McGregor

As the closing exhibition of Somerset House at 25, Infinite Bodies will celebrate Sir Wayne McGregor and his trailblazing collaborations which have radically redefined how we think about performance, movement and the body.

Audiences will be invited to step inside McGregor's polymath practice, which has led him beyond the stage and into creative collaborations across an array of artistic forms, scientific disciplines, and cutting-edge technologies - all centred around the nature of physical intelligence.

This immersive exhibition will bring together McGregor's celebrated choreographic installations and spectacular new commissions that will explore the incredible possibilities and untapped potentials afforded to the body by rapidly evolving technologies.

His Majesty King Charles III has appointed Wayne McGregor CBE a Knighthood in this year’s Birthday Honours List for his pioneering contribution to the field of dance

The appointment recognises Sir Wayne McGregor for how through progressive innovations in performance he has radically redefined dance in the modern era

“I am very honoured to be offered a knighthood and grateful to all of the incredible people who have nurtured me for over 33 years in the art form I love - dance. Building a career in the arts, creative thinkers make a vital and significant contribution to public life and to the nation’s economy whilst experimenting, risk-taking and challenging convention. Recognising that the arts matter, this honour reminds us that every young person given access to culture and creative expression has the opportunity to fly.” - Wayne McGregor

Studio Wayne McGregor welcomes a cohort of 6 outstanding artists whose practice, both individually and collectively, pushes the boundaries of dance, performance, and physical intelligence.

“We all need champions, advocates who nurture our practice, support our dreams and help push forward our vision. In our inaugural RESIDENT 6 programme, all of us at Studio Wayne McGregor will be there for these six exceptional artistic teams. They have been selected for their force of ideas, passion of purpose and sheer determination to make change. We feel lucky to have them call SWM home.”
- Wayne McGregor CBE 

The 2024 RESIDENT 6 artists are:

BULLYACHE
BULLYACHE is a genre-bending dance theatre and music duo that explores working class and queer identity in relation to pop culture, creating reconstructions of classical texts through dance theatre, live music, visual art and film. They were established at the end of the pandemic as a collaboration between friends and artists Courtney and Jacob. They make working class, queer reconstructions of classical texts through the lens of a pop music video. BULLYACHE’s work uses dance theatre, live music and film. BULLYACHE have presented their work TOM at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a part of Horizon Showcase. TOM is a vertigo-inducing pop-culture collision of working class and queer expression. With original live music and dance, TOM oscillates between hyper-speed pop, ambient waves, and auto-tune vocals. TOM is an example of BULLYACHE’s signature brand of genre-bending artistry, music, dance, and visual art. 

dkfash
dkfash is an interdisciplinary artist working across stage, film and entertainment. Her instinctual practice explores storytelling; through text, physical theatre, chorus, surrealism, and collaborative devising. Work Includes Is Dat U Yh (Brixton House), Fragments Of A Complicated Mind (Theatre 503), Eclipse Award 20-21 and Scalped (Without Walls).  She's worked with Royal Shakespeare Company, Bush Theatre, National Theatre, Unicorn Theatre, Royal Exchange Manchester, Sheffield Theatres, Big Freedia & Wizkid (Zinarts).

Rebecca Evans 
Rebecca Evans has made innovative and pioneering digital dance experiences since 2014, in the UK and abroad. Her work uses interactive and immersive technologies combined with dance to create dystopian/utopian worlds that play with time underpinned by a neurodiverse perspective considering different intelligences and ways of sensing. Rebecca has a continued professional practice in contemporary dance and more recently completed an MA in Virtual and Extended Realities from UWE Bristol. Commissions of her work have included 2Faced Dance, Wilton’s Music Hall, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Bedford Creative Arts, DanceEast and London Borough of Culture. As part of Resident 6, Rebecca will explore how digital and movement offers ways to appreciate our mutual dependency as part of a human, environmental and technological ecology, speculating on new futures and ways of being. She will do this through the further development of mixed reality headset work HINTERLANDS, as well as exploring the potential of AI to mediate the intersection of physical and digital motion, and developing processes for dance practitioners and creative technologists to collaborate.

Rowdy SS
Rowdy SS is a London-born and based multi-disciplinary artist. Their work explores the interplay between sound/music, dance/movement, video, and installation. They have been presented + commissioned internationally by Tate Britain, TATE Modern, The ICA, V&A, The Royal Academy, Pace Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, Turner Contemporary, The Southbank Centre, Glastonbury Festival, Palais De Tokyo, Theatre De Ville, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Transmediale, and Block Universe Performance Art Festival. Drawing from the complexities of human experience and bodily existence. Their work aims to create immersive, multi-sensory experiences that challenge the audience's perceptions of the world around them. Whether through found sounds, live instrumentation, set, costume, lighting design or choreographed movement.

Sam Chester
Sam Chester is a London-based digital artist and crafts-person whose work orbits ideas of storytelling, moving between the real and the unreal, the physical and digital. Since graduating Fashion Design from Central Saint Martins in 2017 she was awarded a scholarship from Burberry to complete my Masters at the Royal College of Art in 2021. After which, she worked as a freelance digital artist and designer, and postgraduate tutor on Fashion and Digital Direction programmes at the RCA. She  Chester has been involved in a series of digital technology projects working across communities from 6th form students from the Isle of Sheppey (Beyond Human Workshops) to Indigenous Artisans in Oaxaca Mexico (Swerve Collective). Their fashion costume has been seen on the likes of Bjork, Solange, Karen Elson and featured in publications such as Dazed & Confused, Another Magazine, POP, Vogue China.  

tyroneisaacstuart
tyroneisaacstuart is a dance artist with a diverse skills in hip hop, Krump, contemporary dance, and Jazz music. His journey began with street dance at ‘Boy Blue Ent’ and Jazz music at 'Tomorrow's Warriors.' After completing my his BA in Jazz, he’s collaborated with contemporary artists including Jamila Johnson Small, Nora Chipaumire, Vishal Kumaraswamy, Julianknxx, and Joseph Toonga. He is actively constructing a practice that embodies an interdisciplinary vision comprising two distinct phases that lean into a fine art aesthetic: Phase One (1) revolves around writing, movement, and sound. Phase Two (2) explores movement, sculpture, video art, and sound installation. His work aims to craft bodies of work that fluidly move between hybrid performances, tangible artefacts, and critical studies. 

To find out more about the RESIDENT 6 programme click here. 

Clockwise from top left: Rebecca Evans (image by Neil Catchick), tyroneisaacstuart (image by John Antony Thadicaran), dkfash, Rowdy SS (image by Rosie Powell), Sam Chester and BULLYACHE (image by Andrea Fiumana).

RESIDENT 6 is made possible by generous support from the Jerwood Developing Arts Fund, Aline Foriel-Destezet, our Resident6 Fund supporters (Tarsha Finney, Marina Kleinwort, Paul Mulholland, and Louise Verril), Here East,  the Maria Björnson Memorial Trust and Arts Council England. 

Wayne McGregor, in his role as Director of the Dance Department of La Biennale di Venezia, will announce the programme for the Biennale Danza 2024 on Tuesday 26 March.

The announcement will be part of La Biennale di Venezia’s press conference announcing the 2024 programmes for Theatre, Music, Dance and the Biennale Colleges.

The event will be live-streamed at 12:30pm CET on www.labiennale.org and La Biennale di Venezia’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channel. 


Image: Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia/photo by Andrea Avezzù.

Join Company Wayne McGregor dancers on Saturday 22 April for a one-day lab exploring Wayne McGregor’s repertoire and creative processes.

The day will begin with an energetic and fast-paced contemporary technique class, followed by phrases from Company Wayne McGregor’s repertoire, with the remainder of the day focusing on Wayne McGregor’s creative tools, practices, and exercises.

The lab will offer an exclusive opportunity to experience and explore our bespoke AISOMA technology, centred on Wayne McGregor’s work Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment which was created using an A.I choreographic tool developed in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture Lab.

Participants will be introduced to the AI tool and use it to develop their own material and gain insights into McGregor’s creative practice. They will also have the opportunity to learn excerpts of Company Wayne McGregor’s repertoire.

The lab is suitable for professional dancers, graduates and students enrolled in professional dance training who are 18 and over.

BOOKING
The lab costs £100.

Please click here  to book your place via Eventbrite.


Image: Company Wayne McGregor’s Creative Lab, Studio Wayne McGregor, London (2023), Photographer Jack Thomson.

LOUD LUXURY! When Moschino invited superstar-super-stylist Katie Grand to create a capsule collection for their 40th anniversary runway show '40 Years of Love' during  Milan Fashion Week she asked Wayne McGregor to choreograph his trailblazing company of dancers, COMPANY WAYNE MCGREGOR,  for the final act.

Image: Backstage at Vogue Runway, for Moschino Spring 2024 Ready-to-Wear Photographed by Jason Lloyd Evans

Wayne McGregor said: "The RCA - a world-leading, industry-defining institution (in the best city in the world) has nurtured an inspirational alumni, changing our creative, ethical, and political landscape daily. I feel extremely fortunate to be honoured today in their company. Many of my incredible collaborators have been RCA schooled: provocative, individual and divergent thinkers, always taking the unconventional path to rich new seams of the possible."

Image: Edward Enninful and Wayne McGregor Photographed by Shaun James Cox

Launched in 2017, the PEER  mentoring programme for recent dance graduates offers a range of interactions with the Studio to further develop the skills needed to prepare for a portfolio career and to gain exposure to life as a professional dancer, alongside mentoring and development of a peer network. 

Introducing the 2023 PEER cohort who will be with us until August 2023. This PEER cohort has been generously supported by the Idlewild Trust and the Three Monkies Trust.

Nya Bardouille
Nya Bardouille is a freelance dance artist and holistic movement practitioner from North London. As a Sports Science and Physiology graduate, she practices sports massage at Welbeck Health in Marylebone and is a physical therapist on the CAT scheme at The Place. Recent projects include US and EU tour with Jamie xx, Hang in There, Baby choreographed by John-William Watson and facilitator for NYDC. BODY LANGUAGE is Nya’s ongoing and bespoke practice of mind-body-movement management for dancers.

Lucy Clark
Lucy is a disabled dance artist with an interest in challenging boundaries between art and dance, and the places they can co-exist. She has become fascinated by the vulnerability held within her lived experiences of hidden disability and what happens when this is presented in a performative or multi-disciplinary context. Lucy is co-founder of fuse, an interdisciplinary collective creating performance art which is currently showing work in Oxford and London. As a graduate from Trinity Laban, Lucy has worked with a number of well-established professionals including Stephanie Schober, Daniel Squire, Joel Brown, and has also trained externally with Candoco Dance Company, Stopgap, and Boy Blue to name a few.

Ruby De Ville Morel
Ruby De Ville Morel is a dancer, multidisciplinary artist and movement director, who recently graduated from Trinity Laban Conservatoire with a first class degree in Contemporary Dance. Rooted in the weird and wonderful, they aim to infuse their work with humour, joy and playfulness as they explore identity, queerness and fantasy. Drawn to storytelling Ruby's creativity is threaded with a sense of magic influenced by their childhood spent on the wild natural landscape of Dartmoor.

Maiya  Leeke
Maiya is a London based Contemporary Dance Artist. She is a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate 2023/24, was a finalist in BBC Young Dancer 2022, is alumnus of National Youth Dance Company working with Alesandra Seutin and has an MA from Northern School of Contemporary Dance. She is currently dancing for Candoco Dance Company working with Extended Play Dance, and continues to research her practice with Hawk Dance Theatre, Mimbre, and Alleyne Dance. 

Georgia Rowan
Georgia is a queer, interdisciplinary dance artist based in London. She trained at Iwanson International in Munich before completing an MA at LCDS in 2022. Alongside her movement practice in contemporary and commercial styles, her current research is concerned with connections between human nature, modern society, and myth. It is her aim to create work that challenges, reflects, and encourages conversation, working with professionals and the local community. 

Tom Sutton
Tom is from Middlesbrough and is currently in his graduating year of Rambert School training in Contemporary Dance and Ballet. He previously trained on the CAT program at Dance City in Newcastle and was a member of the National Youth Dance Company in 2019/20. He is particularly curious about the blending of both raw and technical movement to explore character and offbeat theatrical expression. 

Melanie Whitehead Smith
Melanie is dance artist whose practice finds itself in movement, film, theatre and research. Melanie’s work centres around club culture, queer identity and experiences of womanhood.  Graduating from Falmouth University with a First Class BA (hons) Dance and Choreography degree, she went on to work in music videos, short films, commercials and live performance. As a performer, Melanie has worked with artists including: Emeli Sande, Rag’n’Bone Man, Honne, Pride in London and Monica Nicolaides. 


Clockwise from top left: Nya Bardouille, Lucy Clark, Ruby De Ville Morel, Maiya Leeke, Georgia Rowan, Melanie Whitehead Smith, Tom Sutton, Georgia Rowan.

Conciding with the school's centenary celebrations, Wayne McGregor has been announced as the new President of Elmhurst Ballet School, succeeding Sir David Eastwood.

The announcement forms part of an ongoing relationship between Elmhurst Ballet School and Studio Wayne McGregor. Since 2019 the relationship has enabled students to work with professional company artists and explore Wayne McGregor’s creative process and cutting-edge choreographic repertoire, including performances of excerpts of Entity and Atomos.

“Wayne McGregor is regarded as one of the world’s leading choreographers and today’s announcement is an exciting development for Elmhurst as the school celebrates and builds on its one-hundred-year legacy." - Jessica Ward, Principal of Elmhurst Ballet School.

 “I am thrilled to contribute to the vision and future programme of Elmhurst as President. The creative training of young dancers has been a career-long passion. As dance companies worldwide extend their repertoire, dancers need to be equipped with new skills that offer them the best chance to succeed.” - Wayne McGregor CBE.


Image: Rick Guest.