Limen
Wayne McGregor’s latest new work for The Royal Ballet.
Wayne McGregor is The Royal Ballet’s Resident Choreographer. He regularly takes inspiration from the individuality of the company's dancers: their particular gestures and ranges of movement. For this work, he used the highly-trained bodies and classical vocabulary of dancers such as Edward Watson, Leanne Benjamin, Steven McRae, Sarah Lamb and Eric Underwood. What excites him most about choreography, he has often said, is not the intellectual journey, but the physical interaction with the dancers.
Limen is a 26-minute piece for 15 dancers - eight male and seven female. The female dancers are en pointe, lending the work a more classical air than McGregor's previous Royal Ballet commissions. Its centrepiece is an ethereal pas de deux, danced in bright spotlight against a black backdrop, and set to the futuristically raw sounds of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.
McGregor labels his works with distinctive vocabulary. Previous titles have included Qualia (2003), Croma (2006), Nimbus (2007) and Infra (2008). This ballet is called Limen, a Latin word meaning limit or threshold. McGregor says the piece is a meditation on ‘thresholds of life and death, darkness and light, reality and fantasy’. This territory is a favoured theme of Japanese conceptual artist Tatsuo Miyajima, whose sets adorn the ballet.
Miyajima is known for his light and number installations, which draw attention to the passage of time. His sequences of coloured digital numbers count backwards and then repeat, like the hours or minutes of the day. He uses LEDs which fade from dark to light then light to dark like the transition from day to night. Part of his set for the Royal Opera House’s production of Limen is a giant wall of blue LED lights, flashing on and off at different intervals. Each dancer is assigned to a light, and co-ordinates his or her dancing to the sequence of flashes. The result is a cacophony of jarring, unpredictable movements.
Miyajima’s minimalist techtronics and McGregor’s choreography are set to the music of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Saariaho’s distinctive sound combines live music and electronics to stark and mysterious effect. Her composition, about an eclipse of the sun, mirrors the same ’liminal’ concerns at the heart of McGregor’s work.
’Saariaho’s cello concerto Notes On Light is,’ says McGregor, ’very Debussy-esque, hauntingly beautiful, but near the end of the fourth movement everything goes cold. You can feel the light vanishing. I thought the two together would be a fantastic context for a work.’
The meanings of limen
Origin: Latin limen, meaning doorway or threshold
1. a threshold, a point of entering or beginning.
2. the threshold of consciousness (in the fields of psychology and physiology).
In brief
Ballet in one act
Composer: Kaija Saariaho
Choreography: Wayne McGregor
Set designs: Tatsuo Miyajima
Costume designs: Moritz Junge
Lighting design: Lucy Carter
World premiere: 4 November 2009, The Royal Opera House
FUTURE PERFORMANCES
The are currently no future performances
Watch the trailer
Wayne McGregor's Infra
Discover more about McGregor's 2008 work Infra
INFRA: FUTURE PERFORMANCES
19 FEB-4 MAR 2009
View ticket information
Wayne McGregor's Chroma
Discover more about McGregor's
previous work Chroma, 2006
