The inspiration for Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Tree of Codes was Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name. Foer’s book, published in 2010, is a peculiar entity. To create it, he took Bruno Schulz’s mythological The Street of Crocodiles (1934), and excised most of the words, carving out a surreal new story. Critical opinion of Foer is sharply divided. Heather Wagner of Vanity Fair called Tree of Codes “a quietly stunning work of art”, but for Harry Siegel, formerly of New York Press: “Foer isn’t just a bad author, he’s a vile one”.
McGregor himself is no stranger to controversy, and it’s easy to see why Foer’s work, with its subversive spirit and dreamlike strangeness, appealed to him. But the result is unexpected. There’s a part of McGregor that celebrates the cerebral, but there’s another part, increasingly to the fore, that can’t resist the impulse to razzle-dazzle us. And it’s this latter part – McGregor as old-fashioned showman – that wins out in Tree of Codes, a ballet in which the elusive poetry of Foer’s book is nowhere evident.
Superbly danced by a cast of 15 – six from the Paris Opera Ballet, the others from Company Wayne McGregor – the work is a precision-cut spectacular set to a specially commissioned score by the producer Jamie xx, and with an elaborate, evolving set by Olafur Eliasson. The choreography is McGregor at his most intricate. Bodies fill the stage, rippling and swaying, probing the air with hyperextended limbs. Duos and trios interlock, engaging and disengaging with cool fluency. Marie-Agnès Gillot, the Paris Opera étoile, is possessed of a fabulously commanding grace, all lean curves and contained power. Jérémie Bélingard, also an étoile, measures out his moves with the tense economy of a panther. Daniela Neugebauer, a longtime McGregor dancer, darts and flickers like a switchblade.
Technically, it’s awesome. And the state-of-the-art effects are nothing if not impressive. The work opens in darkness with the dancers invisible except for pinpoints of light set into their costumes. When they move, it’s as if constellations are forming and reforming. Eliasson’s sets are reflective and translucent; they mirror the dancers, distort sight-lines, and shear the stage space into unexpected configurations. Jamie xx’s score, meanwhile, veers between the anthemic, with dreamy vocals reminiscent of Ennio Morricone, and a steely, insistent pulse. It’s all very winsome and beguiling.
But I’m not sure I’d like to live in McGregor’s icy, Apollonian universe. Its occupants are dazzling, but they have no hinterland. They quote the choreography of intimacy and eroticism, but have no capacity for either. And for all the dizzying hyperactivity on stage, nothing is being said. The piece is all action, and no consequence. There’s no place here for the Dionysian – for the chaotic, the visceral, the irrational. Instead, all is lock-down and control. It’s revealing, given that this is a ballet based on a leap of the imagination – a ballet that in theory could take flight in any direction that it wanted – that no one on McGregor’s stage ever jumps. If you leave the stage, it’s because you’re lifted, especially if you’re a woman.
In this ballet, as elsewhere in McGregor’s work, there are profound issues of female agency. Women dance solos – spectacularly in several cases – but without significantly covering ground. Sooner or later, a man, or men, will carry, walk, push, pull or otherwise convey them to a new location. En route, they are likely to be manipulated into dramatically unstable and vulnerable positions: split, hyperextended or off balance. This divergence of gender roles is such a consistent feature of McGregor’s choreography as to be effectively intrinsic to it. Only in Woolf Works, which had its premiere earlier this year, and was created in collaboration with the writer and dramaturg Uzma Hameed, are female characters given full physical and emotional autonomy.
That said, there’s something rather splendid and Victorian in McGregor’s desire to bring cutting-edge effects and design elements to the ballet stage. But the consequence, as in the 19th century, is that the dancers can sometimes appear to be just one more visual effect, sent out to impress, but not to express. Of Foer, the US critic Anis Shivani writes: “Gimmick after gimmick is what Foer excels at. Always quick to jump on the bandwagon of the moment.” This is not true of McGregor, but it is increasingly the case that McGregor’s eclecticism, his magpie eye for the shiny and new, leads him to construct work that is all about surface and impact. The contributory elements and the process appear radical, but the gender politics and the tightly bound choreography are highly conservative.
So we should let McGregor razzle-dazzle us, and enjoy the marvels that he conjures up, but we should not be persuaded that any profound truths wait behind the smoke and mirrors. Nor should McGregor’s Tree of Codes be read as a continuation of Foer’s literary project, because while Foer’s work is inescapably indebted to Schulz’s novel, McGregor’s ballet cuts all ties. Foer’s work is merely its point of departure, long vanished into the distance. A McGregor piece, whatever its ostensible inspiration, is always a McGregor piece. The medium is the message.
