Wayne McGregor’s New Ballet Puts Saul Nash at the Center of Alchemies
At the Royal Opera House, Wayne McGregor is adding another collaborator to a practice already defined by them. A new unnamed work by the British choreographer and fashion designer Saul Nash will premiere as part of Alchemies, the mixed bill running from April 18 to May 6. The pairing makes sense in McGregor’s world, where choreography is only one part of the equation and costume, music, and set design carry equal weight.
Nash, who founded his eponymous label in 2018 and is now based in Milan, comes to the project with a background in dance as well as fashion. McGregor has said he was drawn to Nash because he understands motion from the inside and works with technical fabrics shaped for the body in flow. Nash, in turn, described his approach as a modernization of what dance costume has long been, especially in ballet, where clothing has always had to balance visibility, structure, and freedom.
Alchemies also revisits two earlier McGregor works: Yugen, first staged in 2018, and Untitled, 2023. Yugen paired Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms with blood-red costumes by Shirin Guild and a set by Edmund de Waal. McGregor has said de Waal’s liturgical upbringing made him a natural fit for the score’s psalmic resonance, while Guild’s garments — loose vests and drop-crotch trousers — were designed to move with the dancers rather than resist them.
Untitled, 2023 extended that collaborative logic in a different direction, drawing inspiration from Carmen Herrera’s abstract canvases and involving costumes by Daniel Lee. Herrera, who died in 2022 at the age of 106, brought a visual language of clarity and restraint to the work. Together, the two pieces show how McGregor treats ballet less as a fixed form than as a meeting place for artists with distinct disciplines and sensibilities.
That approach has deep roots. The article traces a lineage that runs from Marie Taglioni’s tutu in La Sylphide in 1832 to the confrontational designs of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Pablo Picasso’s vast backdrop for Le Train Bleu, and Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. McGregor’s work belongs to that history, but it also updates it for the present, where fashion designers, visual artists, and choreographers continue to test how far ballet can stretch without losing its precision.
