'We're being starved of the arts in this country'

As his new Royal Ballet show opens, the star choreographer Wayne McGregor tells Nancy Durrant that 'levelling up' should mean more money for culture, not less

NAVIGATING the bowels of the Royal Opera House, which resembles — as is traditional in buildings with airy, elegant public spaces — a warren of tired hospital corridors, it’s head-swimmingly hot. It’s because of the dancers, I’m told, to keep their muscles warm so they don't get injured as they train, rehearse and perform; Olympians disguised as swans, squabbling aliens, or anguished poets.

I'm here to meet the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose Universe: A Dark Crystal Odyssey, a reimagining of Jim Henson's 1982 cult epic The Dark Crystal (squabbling aliens), has just opened in the ROH Linbury Studio, danced by his own company, Studio Wayne McGregor.

His next, a collaboration with the late Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, with costumes designed by Burberry's Daniel Lee, premieres on the ROH main stage next week. He's also in his third year as director of the dance biennale in Venice, and his new piece for the National Youth Dance Company, Novacene, is at Sadler's Wells in June.

Tall and thin with long limbs, preternaturally youthful (he's 53 going on 40) with an elegant bald head and puffy basketball boots, McGregor looks, as dancer-choreographer Oona Doherty put it, "like he's from the future".

He also couldn't be nicer, welcoming me with a hug and showing me pictures of the house he and his partner Antoine Vereecken, who oversees McGregor's work worldwide, have built-in Kenya.

For his new show, McGregor met Herrera at her studio in New York, where he'd gone to invite her to design a set for Covent Garden. She was 102.