Found in Translation: Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM, Reconsidered

Heather Ogden in the National Ballet of Canada's MADDADDAM. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

In 2022, I walked out of Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre and wrote that MADDADDAM — Wayne McGregor’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of visionary novels — had gotten lost in translation, the story confounding, the choreography swallowed by its own scenography. Watching the National Ballet of Canada’s revival last Saturday night, I retract nearly all of it. This time I was not confused so much as conquered. I felt, for the first time, that I was in the presence of genius.

This co-production with London’s Royal Ballet has been seamlessly revised since its Canadian premiere; what’s been cut or added is impossible to detect, which is itself a kind of artistry. What I know is that it now asks to be met on different terms. Abandon the program notes — stop hunting for Blanco, stop needing to know why Ren matters — and MADDADDAM stops being a plot you’ve failed to follow and becomes what it actually is: snapshot storytelling, an accretion of images rather than a narrative line, a grim portrait of humanity today. McGregor’s vocabulary is sweeping and quirky at once, all cut and slice, velocity broken by sudden stillness, phrases so rapid and off the beat you marvel that bodies could memorize them. He scales constantly — soloist to duet to trio to a whole stage of bodies in organized chaos — and nothing sits still long enough to settle into convention.

Act I, “Castaway,” opens with a child’s voice warning that chaos is what makes people do bad things, then proves it: staged in near-darkness beneath We Not I’s egg-like orb, Lucy Carter’s lighting doing as much storytelling as any dancer. Ravi Deepres’ projections — burning cars, balaclava-clad protesters, faceless militia moving in — make the line between Atwood’s dystopia and the day’s news distressingly thin. Pigoons, genetic engineering, biomedical hubris: none of it reads as speculative once you remember organ-harvesting research is real. A sexual assault sequence is simply, deliberately terrifying — this is a post-apocalypse where people are capable of decency and horror in the same breath.

Act II, “Extinctathon,” is hyperkinetic, framed as a video game — push, survive, reset — its chronology fluid, looping back to fill in the love triangle of Jimmy, Oryx and Crake, alongside Toby’s God’s Gardeners, beneath a scaffolded cityscape. The score turns industrial here, electronic pulse with barely an orchestra in earshot, and at one violent turn the sound drops to something close to a nature recording: flies audibly  circling a carcass. Bodies pop, contort, hips thrusting off-kilter, classical line deliberately warped — McGregor’s vocabulary at its most idiosyncratic. 

Act III, “Dawn,” arrives after Crake’s bio-engineered fix for humanity’s collapse, and the dancing here turns fluid, curved, oceanic — bodies like seaweed, birds, fish — set against Gareth Pugh’s skintight cream and turquoise unitards, evoking heavenly skies and rebirthing pools of water.

Present in all three acts, Siphesihle November’s Snowman (aka Jimmy, who believes he’s the last human left alive) carries real ache as the man despairing from the sidelines. Harrison James, back as a guest from San Francisco Ballet, brings a chilling remove to Crake; Koto Ishihara’s Oryx and Heather Ogden’s Toby both anchor scenes that could otherwise spin away. Jason Ferro is a standout in the ensemble’s Act III flowering.

The company of the National Ballet of Canada in MADDADDAM. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

Dramaturg Uzma Hameed’s structuring choice — a child’s voice, faintly electronic, threading the acts together — turns out to be the work’s real key. Her interpolated creation myth, in which an owl lays two eggs, one of animals and one of words, and eats the words herself, leaving animals voiceless, is simple and devastating. It tells you what the ballet is actually about: not Atwood’s plot, but the old human business of myth-making itself — Eden, the flood, Gilgamesh, refracted through pigoons and a maybe-utopia closed out by one wickedly evocative red baseball cap — you don’t need to read it to know what it’s suggesting. 

Max Richter’s original score is just as essential: symphonic one moment, choral or electronic the next, never thinning despite its range. A frequent McGregor collaborator (Woolf Works, Infra), Richter was recently Oscar-nominated for Hamnet; it’s his music that gives the ballet’s intentional ambiguity its emotional heft.

So I was wrong the first time, or at least incomplete. MADDADDAM doesn’t ask to be explained. It asks to be witnessed. 

– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.