The ballet ‘MADDADDAM’ should be like Margaret Atwood’s novels: something you can’t put down, says Wayne McGregor

Wayne McGregor’s world premiere ballet “MADDADDAM” may be based on an acclaimed trilogy of novels by Margaret Atwood, but that doesn’t mean it sets out to recreate their stories exactly.

Rather, McGregor is trying to “share something of the brilliance and dazzle of … not being able to put those novels down,” he said. “It’s about having a physical experience like reading, but in another form.”

McGregor has been fascinated by Atwood’s writing for many years and this project has been in the works since 2016, when the National Ballet’s former artistic director, Karen Kain, orchestrated a meeting between Atwood and McGregor at his request. Atwood is billed as creative consultant but is not actively involved in the making of the show, preferring to encounter it for the first time on opening night.

Her work has been adapted into other artistic genres before — in addition to the Emmy-winning television adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” for example, an opera version premiered at the Royal Danish Opera in 2000. At this point in her career, Atwood said, “it’s not a choice whether” she allows other artists to adapt her work, it’s “who you will let do it. Do you feel you’re putting it into good hands? Wayne McGregor is good hands.”

The project is one of a number of McGregor’s contemporary ballets inspired by major literary works, also including “Woolf Works,” based on Virginia Woolf’s writing, and “The Dante Project,” inspired by “The Divine Comedy.”

McGregor made those previous pieces at the Royal Ballet in London, England, where he has been resident choreographer since 2006. “MADDADDAM” is different: a co-commission by the Royal Ballet and Canada’s National Ballet, it’s premiering in Toronto and is being created with the dancers here.

“Making a piece here is different fundamentally than making a piece in London,” McGregor said, “where the physical legacy, the physical histories and the physical archive is different.”

The trilogy treats themes of capitalism, consumerism, environmental catastrophe, and the destructive and generative potentials of technology and scientific experimentation.

The first books, “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood,” tell of a scientist who purposely creates a global pandemic to make way for a genetically engineered humanoid species. Those two books jump back and forth in time, recounting the same situations from multiple perspectives. The third instalment in the trilogy, “MaddAddam,” focuses on a group of people looking to rebuild civilization.

The production brings together a number of McGregor’s frequent collaborators: composer Max Richter, dramaturge Uzma Hameed, costume designer Gareth Pugh, lighting designer Lucy Carter, film designer Ravi Deepres and the architecture firm We Not I, which is designing the scenography.

The creative process began — as is McGregor’s regular practice — with members of the creative team reading the books and starting to create small pieces of material in their respective areas, which he called “atoms.”

“Max will build some little atoms for music. I’ll think about some choreographic atoms. Design will start with some atoms, and then we bring them back to the table and discuss which ones have the most value to carry on with. They emerge into slightly bigger atoms,” he said, and so on in a back-and-forth process that generates a large amount of material.

McGregor then goes into the studio and builds the choreography with the dancers. “I don’t come in going ‘These are the steps; this is what you will do,’” he said. “I offer it up as a series of questions and go, ‘I’m interested in this thing. What kinds of things might we be able to make together?’”

McGregor has been impressed by the National Ballet dancers’ curiosity and their work ethic: “They’ve really reflected on the work and come back offering a greater version than the thing we started with,” he said. “We have not spent hours going over material that I saw two weeks ago.”

As is usual in her collaborations with McGregor, Hameed waited until quite late in the process to meet with the dancers and give them an overview of the books themselves. “It almost adds an extra layer of illumination over the top of what they’ve been doing,” she said.

In that meeting, the dancers connected with “the theme of survival, how we are with our ancestors, ideas of colonialism and the creating of stories for new people,” she said. “It felt from my listeners that this was something they very much understood … I think it would’ve been different had we made (the show with) the Royal Ballet dancers.”

It’s a three-part production with each act lasting about half an hour, broken up by two intermissions. In the second act, the audience will observe the dancers both in and out of character, which Hameed said is intended to engage viewers and underline that what they’re seeing is not “something over there from which they’re quite removed and quite comfortably safe” — that while on the one hand some aspects of the stories are futuristic, Atwood’s writing responds to the world we live in.

“This is one of the brilliant things about Margaret Atwood,” said McGregor. “Her activism lies at the centre of the way in which she writes and she uses story to make us see ourselves in a different way.”

“Her concerns are the big questions of our time,” said composer Richter. “And I think creative work can be a useful space to deal with those questions. It’s a sort of collective thinking through things.”

As Hameed pointed out, Atwood regularly challenges claims that she’s pessimistic. “What she often says is, ‘It hasn’t happened yet. We still have a choice,’” said Hameed. “There is a sense that it isn’t entirely sewn up … that was something that we wanted to lean into. When you get Atwood, you get the whole package. You’re not just getting a fiction writer. You’re getting somebody who’s very, very progressive and at the front of the environmental movement, and actively taking part in these things.”

Part of what drew Atwood to McGregor’s work was that he’s known to be an innovator who works with cutting-edge and emerging technologies; another of his recent projects is the “ABBA: Voyage” concert currently playing in London, which features avatars of the famous quartet alongside a live band.

Atwood welcomes such experimentation. “It’s not that the theatre has ever been without technology,” she said. “They were making great pits of hell in medieval times … It’s always been a medium that has used other media where it could.”

When I spoke to them for this article, McGregor and Hameed were heading into technical rehearsals, the crux moment when all major elements of the production come together and when things emerge that might need to be cut or changed. This brings challenges, but “we’ve learned we have to trust the process and that, when things are difficult, we’ve got to dig deeper,” said Hameed. “There isn’t really any alternative.”

“Well, what is stress?” asked McGregor when I asked him if this was nerve-wracking. “I’ve been doing this kind of process for 30 years and it never gets any easier. Of course, you do care about it. I really care about it. I care that in some way we do justice to those novels. Recently I’ve had Virginia Woolf on my shoulder and Dante on the other, but I can flick them off because they’re not with us anymore. But we’ve got Margaret very much on our mind.”

As for Atwood herself, she has no idea what she’s going to see onstage on opening night: “I like being surprised,” she said.

“I went to the premiere of the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ opera in Copenhagen and didn’t know if it would be terrible or great. You’re just on the edge of your seat. That’s what you want. I am an audience member when I am in the theatre; I want what other audience members want. Surprise me, make me go wow!”

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