Wayne McGregor, Royal Ballet

17 January 2026

By Zoë Hewitt

You go to Woolf Works expecting literature. What you meet instead is weather: time rotating, memory drifting, and bodies speaking in a language that refuses to settle.

I now, I then

Woolf’s voice fills the theatre at the start of the evening. The transcript slides across the scrim, then blurs. Sentences melt into one another until they look like data. Then they scatter and disappear. At the centre of it all, Natalia Osipova stands as our Woolf, holding stillness like a thought held too tightly. When the words vanish, movement takes over. The search begins.

The stage holds two registers at once: Woolf in life, and Woolf in thought. Under her own voice, Virginia Woolf, also the older Clarissa, stays in view while Richard, Patricio Revé, hovers with the soft insistence of care, urging rest, urging silence, urging her to stop writing as if stopping might keep her safe.

Then Mrs Dalloway begins to move. Marcelino Sambé’s Septimus throws his body forward again and again, each time caught by Marco Masciari’s Evans at the last possible moment. A shoulder offered as a brace, a wrist gripped just in time, a lift that reads less like display than rescue. They circle, collide, lock, release, as if grief keeps resetting the same few gestures until the body finally gives in. Akane Takada’s Rezia tries to pull him back through touch, catching his chest, pressing a palm to his back, stepping into his path, only to be shaken loose again.

Across the stage, Sae Maeda’s Young Clarissa finds Sally in Leticia Dias, in movement that barely touches the floor. They skim and turn, close enough for breath to count as contact: a shoulder brushing past, fingers grazing an arm, two bodies folding into the same line before separating too quickly. The kiss arrives almost mid-step, brief and bright, then gone. Woolf watches from the side, still as a held breath. Then she shifts, and for a moment she takes the girls’ place, repeating the gesture as if imagination has slipped out of her head and into her body.

I now, I then ends like weather turning: the first sign that a new language is about to arrive.

Becomings

The second programme, Becomings, begins without a centre. Bodies arrive and vanish, then return, before any hierarchy has time to form. Sound settles low in the body, continuous and heavy, flattening the sense of time. I stop trying to follow who is who and begin to notice my breathing instead.

Light and haze thicken the space. Lasers draw lines that do not guide the eye so much as hold it in place. At moments they reach beyond the stage, brushing the audience, pulling us into the same grid. There is no clear place to rest.

Movement repeats, mutates, slips away. Dancers pass through one another’s paths with relentless continuity, phrases returning slightly altered, then dissolving again. Time stretches. Focus drifts. Smoke, light, repetition. For a second I wonder why this feels so familiar, then realise it recalls 1980s science fiction, the fog-filled futures of Blade Runner. The thought arrives and leaves as quickly as it comes.

Then the space turns outward. Lasers sweep over the audience, crossing above our heads, forming sharp triangles in the air. LEDs flare along the upper balconies, and suddenly the auditorium is exposed. Faces, rows, bodies all lit at once. There is nowhere left to hide. It feels less like observing a work than being located by it.

Briefly, the air sharpens. Fumi Kaneko and Marcelino Sambé cut through the flow with sudden clarity. Their duet moves fast and close, weight exchanged before the eye can settle: a quick change of direction, an off-balance catch, momentum redirected at the last possible moment. The precision is arresting. It pulls me back into the room, just long enough to realise how far I had drifted.