The Royal Ballet’s MADDADDAM at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Saturday 30^th November 2024

First performed by the National Ballet of Canada in the immediate wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Wayne McGregor’s adaptation of Margaret’s Atwood’s beloved MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) offers a vision of a world chillingly close to our own. Across its three acts, the ballet moves before and after ‘the waterless flood’, a deliberately engineered plague that almost completely obliterates the human race. However, the similarities to our present do not end with the global spread of disease. As it narrates the end of human civilisation, McGregor’s MADDADDAM also chronicles the early days of the Crakers, a genetically engineered humanoid species who live in the post-apocalyptic world. The Crakers are an aesthetically idealised and intellectually simplified version of humanity; beautiful and perfectly proportioned according to the predilections of their creator, Crake, they are designed not to experience sexual jealousy nor to communicate using metaphor and symbol. Though such a level of genetic engineering may never be possible, recent advances in genome editing technology mean that we are closer than ever before to the types of genetic manipulation that McGregor’s ballet portrays. MADDADDAM asksurgent questions about how such advances in biotechnology might intersect with environmental catastrophe and advanced capitalism, all while asserting the importance of storytelling for understanding and responding to the world we inhabit.

Split into three wildly different acts, the ballet treats its source texts as a jumping-off point rather than a strict narrative blueprint. For those who are familiar with Atwood’s novels, recognisable elements of her plot are most apparent in the first act ‘Castaway’, which tells the story of Jimmy or Snowman (Joseph Sissens). He is seemingly the last man, who wanders the empty earth living in his memories of life before the waterless flood. This pre-pandemic world is one controlled by corporations, where genetic editing and splicing is rife, and art and symbolism are valued only as agents of capitalism. In this environment, Crake (William Bracewell), a scientific genius and Jimmy’s childhood friend and romantic rival, is able to flourish. After rising to the top of the corporate pharmaceutical industry, he creates the Crakers. At the same time, he engineers the BlyssPluss pill, which causes euphoria but also spreads a virus that wipes out humanity. This is all part of Crake’s plan, as is the survival of Jimmy who, after the apocalypse, is left to teach the Crakers how to exist in the world. A pas de trois between Jimmy, Crake and Oryx (Fumi Kaneko), a sex worker who is romantically entangled with both men, tells the story of Crake’s manipulation of his friend to bring about this situation. His movements are always choreographed one step ahead of Jimmy’s, who falls into line behind him. Crake’s ability to manoeuvre Jimmy’s emotions and actions mirrors his aspiration to control the Craker’s personalities through genetic engineering. He represents the dangerous elements of gene-editing technology and demonstrates the nefarious purposes to which they could be put.

Throughout the first act, a huge egg-like structure (created by architects We Not I) dominates the stage. Projected on it is footage of the natural world; a vast red eye, an insect’s eye view of a forest and a pack of hunting wolves. This imagery evokes a world gone back to nature. All of this is contrasted with the techno-artificiality of Act II, ‘EXTINCTATHON’, which is set before the pandemic has wreaked havoc across the earth. In this second part of the ballet, the production design draws on aesthetics of videogames in its set and costuming. The choreography here is angular and disjointed in a style we have come to expect from McGregor as Max Richter’s score moves from lyrical orchestral work to electronic sounds. These accompany the developments of Crake’s scientific research, as we watch the downfall of humanity until only one player is left standing at the end.

The stark contrast between the aesthetics of Acts I and II sets up a binary between the natural and the artificial. At one point in Act II, a video of IVF is projected above the dancers, bringing a familiar, though revolutionary reproductive technology into the production’s dystopian imaginary. This contrasts with the giant egg which looms over the stage in Act I signifying natural reproduction and, with the images projected onto it, appears to be gestating the new world. However, the simultaneously post-apocalyptic and Edenic world of ‘Castaway’ is possible only through the distinctly unnatural practices shown in ‘EXTINCTATHON’. Crake’s attempt to control his humanoid race, programming them to live in harmony with their environment seems to exalt an idea of ‘naturalness’ but is possible only through the manipulation and control of biology, a process that could be seen as distinctly unnatural. The ballet thus foregrounds one of the central conceptual tensions of genome editing technology; that it aims at predetermination of circumstance through nature but relies on a highly controlled and artificial means of achieving this.

The third and final act, ‘Dawn’, moves forward to a time when the world is peopled by Crakers who have cross-bred with the human survivors. While they live in harmony with the natural world as Crake planned, his attempts to rid them of symbolic thinking have not been successful. The Crakers re-enact the stories of Jimmy and other human survivors, using props to represent the different characters in their new creation mythology. While this section was beautifully choreographed and performed, more could have been made throughout the production of the Crakers difference from the human characters. Though the plot synopsis in the programme emphasises their inability to use metaphor and symbolism, the choreography did not adequately evoke a distinction between the two species. However, this Act goes the furthest in imparting McGregor’s primary message: that telling stories is an inescapable part of language and consciousness, as well as being vital for the creation of shared ways of navigating the world and the creation of community. At the same time, this focus on the Craker’s storytelling traditions advances a critique of genetic determinism that bristles against the absolute control that we saw Crake aspiring to in the first act. The Crakers do not conform to their genetic programming and instead take on human practices of mythmaking, using these to understand the formation of their own society.

In adapting these texts using dance, McGregor picks up threads from the novels. In the first of these Oryx and Crake (2003), the vastly underfunded and devalued liberal arts education that Jimmy receives is undertaken at the Martha Graham Academy, which is named after a pioneer of early-twentieth-century contemporary dance. McGregor uses dance to tell this story as an act of defiance against the fictional world it represents. Indeed, it is perhaps unsurprising that McGregor emphasises in his production Atwood’s assertion of the importance of metaphor and of representational art; as a wordless narrative mode which uses gesture to describe actions, ballet is one of the most symbolic artforms. MADDADDAM uses dance to bring Atwood’s texts to life, the symbolic movements of the choreography underscoring the text’s central message.

Having said that, the production does not purely rely on the symbolism of dance in its storytelling. There is an introductory voiceover by Tilda Swinton and then narrative interjections by a Craker child, their voice distorted through what sounds like analogue technology, creating a retrofuturist feel to Craker society. The child’s voiceover provides an overarching narrative to the whole production framing it as the story of how their people came to tell stories. Though at the start this is an affective and haunting element of the production, by the end it has become somewhat cloying and overdetermined, filling in narrative and emotional impact that is perhaps lacking elsewhere.

For a choreographer who has also taken inspiration from Virginia Woolf and Dante, Atwood’s trilogy is fitting as well as timely source material. As well as continuing his literary engagement, MADDADDAM also draws on many of the themes that have occupied McGregor throughout his career, such as technology and the limits of the human body, the exaggerated and over-extended movements of the dancers suggesting the expansion of human capabilites. Published in the early years of the twentieth century, Atwood’s trilogy speculates about the futures of biotechnology and genetic engineering in a system in which corporations hold the power. However, she has often been at pains to emphasise that these speculations are very much rooted in our own reality: ‘It is our world, except with a few twists’ (Guardian 2013). And indeed, many aspects of the novels seem even closer to fruition now than when they were first published. The development of CRISPR-Cas9 technology in 2012 and its use in the editing of human embryos in 2018, show that we are nearer than ever before to the world of Maddaddam.

McGregor’s approach to this material is to realise the prescience of the world Atwood creates by deliberately drawing parallels with our own present, weaving scientific possibility together with political reality. While the setting of a post-pandemic world is sure to resonate with audiences, McGregor underscores links to the early twentieth century by making one of the relics left over after the apocalypse a red MAGA (Make America Great Again) baseball cap, like those that have been an iconic feature of each of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. In grounding its fictional world in our present reality, MADDADDAM asks its audiences to consider how technological possibility is intertwined with political will. In doing so, he suggests, it is the story that is told about something that is important. Neither genetics nor technology are able to determine outcomes on their own without the apparatus of narrative to utilise and make sense of them.

McGregor’s adaptation is bold and ambitious. Both Atwood’s novels and his ballet speak to fundamental concerns of the present; genetic modification; corporate power; human-caused climate change; and the depletion of the arts and humanities. While the ballet is perhaps not always successful in weaving these concerns together and presenting a coherent narrative, it creates an immersive world that will no doubt lead its audiences to create links between our political and scientific present, and our environmental and reproductive futures.

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