"His Olivier Awardwinning triptych, Woolf Works, remains an ambitious and distinctive response to Virginia Woolf, translating her restless, questioning intelligence into movement that fractures, flows, and repeats, set to Max Richter's hypnotic score. Drawing on Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves, Woolf Works avoids conventional narrative, unfolding instead as a sequence of sensations. Each section occupies its own carefully shaped world, with different visual designs and choreographic textures, yet all inspired by Woolf herself, her writing, her interior life, her elusiveness."
"Woolf was intensely sensitive to the rhythm and music of language, and her writing privileges emotion, memory, and consciousness over plot. Stories nonetheless emerge through its poetic force. Dance works in much the same way, meaning carried through gesture and rhythm rather than words, through what is felt rather than stated. In Woolf Works, McGregor draws on this shared terrain, using movement to evoke something essential of Woolf's imaginative world. The ballet largely sidesteps literal storytelling."
Woolf Works is an Olivier Award-winning triptych created by Wayne McGregor in 2015 for the Royal Ballet, returned to the Royal Opera House in 2026. The work translates Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves into non-linear, sensation-driven choreography set to Max Richter's hypnotic score. Each part occupies a distinct visual and choreographic world inspired by Virginia Woolf's interior life and elusiveness. Movement privileges rhythm, memory and consciousness over plot, with dancers adopting extreme angles, off-balance and out-of-sync phrasing that can sharpen into sudden clarity. Classical lines are unsettled by an urgent physicality, producing an emotionally charged, contemporary evening.
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