Three years ago, the Scala premiere of Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works was received in genuine triumph. Therefore, it was an obvious consequence to immediately plan a new collaboration between the choreographer and the Milanese company, this time based upon a new creation. Alessandra Ferri, the pivotal figure in McGregor’s dramatic conception in Woolf Works, acted as the go-between for McGregor and La Scala on that occasion, and this time it also seemed natural that the new production would enjoy her presence. In 2018, Ferri had been the lead in McGregor’s first creation for American Ballet Theatre – AfteRite, set on Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps – and AfteRite became the starting point also for this new Scala diptych.
The new creation for La Scala's dancers is based on another Stravinsky’s masterpiece, Les Noces. After all, there are many links between the two celebrated scores – both were created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, both were inspired by ancient Russian social rites, both exempla of the revolutionary visions of dance by the two legendary Nijinsky siblings, Vaslav and Bronislava. But if all these elements could clearly explain why McGregor had chosen to match the two titles, what gives the inner organicity to his staging is the powerful dramatic structure he has cleverly conceived with the dramaturg Uzma Hameed, so that Les Noces, now entitled LORE, becomes the sequel of AfteRite.
The dramaturgy of AfteRite is based upon a strong inspiration born by the current chronicles about the ecological crisis and the responsibilities of human beings to the desertification of the planet. Moreover, a movie describing the endless research of what remains of the disappeared victims of the Pinochet regime by some Chilean women in the most desolate places on earth, the Atacama Desert, gave the authors the perfect dramatic turning point in their reading of human sacrifice. In their vision, the Chosen One has to be a mother, compelled to the extreme sacrifice by the violent human ferocity due to the laws of survival.
McGregor’s dramatic intentions are clearly readable from the very opening of AfteRite. The dark set evokes an arid, mysterious landscape; on the left, there is a glass greenhouse, with two little girls inside, to look after the plants. From the opening it is clear that the two worlds will somehow collide, and the collision will provoke the tragedy: to preserve the precarious ecological system someone will be sacrificed. It is up to the mother, compelled by the ferocious humans who depend on it to survive, to choose which one of her two children will die. This cruel plot, to which Stravinsky’s perturbing music matches perfectly, is translated by McGregor’s choreography with a too ‘classical’ flavour ( underlined by the use of pointe shoes). The dance sequences respond perfectly to the music, which remains in its rhythmic frames, without taking any true risk of going ‘beyond borders’ to express the innate wild ferocity of a community who would kill a child to grant survival. Strangely indeed, the choreographer remains cautious, above all when imagining the ensemble dances that are too often in academic unison, which gives to the attack a too controlled energy which succumbs to the power of the music. Also, the duets – although intense and demanding in partnering – only show glimpses of McGregor's iconic, dazzling, polycentric movements.