Wayne McGregor brings his incredible skills to Hong Kong - but will visionary British choreographer be back?
McGregor, the leading British dance creator of his generation, talks to Fionnuala McHugh on a recent visit to Hong Kong to hold workshops with local dancers
Wayne McGregor looks like an unusually skinny soccer player; the tracksuit, the shaven head, the earring and a certain loose-limbed ease suggest the Beautiful Game.
It's true that he knows about deft footwork and he's keen on team play but his skills aren't displayed on a pitch. He's a British choreographer - some would say the leading one of his generation (he's 45) - and he and his team spent last week in Hong Kong doing workshops that culminated in a "dance dialogue" at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
He was invited here by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (the British Council was a co-partner). McGregor, as well as being the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer, has his own company, Random Dance, which he founded in 1992. He clearly embraces the concept of random but this WKCDA association certainly seems somewhat … unexpected.
"I knew a little about West Kowloon," he says. He knows Michael Lynch, WKCDA's recently departed chief executive, from Lynch's time as head of London's Southbank Centre, "so I'm sort of keeping an eye on it".
When he met Anna Chan, WKCDA's head of artistic development for dance, last year and she began making overtures, he realised there were "synergies in aspiration".