✦ Origins ✦
Wayne McGregor created Chroma for The Royal Ballet, where it premiered at the Royal Opera House on November 17, 2006. The score, by longtime collaborator Joby Talbot, combined original composition with orchestrated arrangements - by Christopher Austin - of three songs by the American rock duo The White Stripes: "Aluminum," "The Hardest Button to Button," and "Blue Orchid." It was staged inside a set by architect John Pawson, known for his austere minimalist buildings; Chroma was his first work designing for the stage, and he built a stark white box with a cut-out aperture at the rear that flooded the space with light, leaving the ten dancers with nowhere to hide. Costumes were designed by Moritz Junge.
The piece was made on a cast of ten - among them Edward Watson, Steven McRae, Eric Underwood, Alina Cojocaru, and Tamara Rojo - and arrived just as McGregor's reputation as a choreographer working outside classical convention was reaching the Royal Ballet's main stage in full force. Its reception was decisive: the production led directly to McGregor's appointment that same year as the company's resident choreographer, the first contemporary choreographer to hold that post.
What Makes It Distinct
Pawson's set strips away almost every convention of a Royal Ballet production: no scenery beyond the white box itself, no romantic lighting states, no costumes built for character. Against that severity, McGregor's choreography reads as maximally extreme - joints and spines pushed past textbook alignment, weight thrown off axis, and phrasing that shifts speed unpredictably against Talbot's score. The female dancers perform entirely off pointe, a choice that breaks with the visual grammar of a Royal Ballet stage as pointedly as the choreography itself does.
The mix of Talbot's orchestral writing with rearranged White Stripes songs was itself unusual for a company built on 19th-century classical scores, and it set a template McGregor would return to throughout his career: pairing classically trained dancers with music, design, and movement vocabulary drawn from well outside the ballet tradition, without softening any of the three to fit the others.
Legacy
Chroma won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production in 2007, along with the Critics' Circle National Dance Award for Best Choreography, and it remains one of The Royal Ballet's most performed contemporary works. It has since been staged by companies well beyond London, including San Francisco Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, The Australian Ballet, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which in 2013 became the first modern dance company to take it into repertory.
More than any other single work, Chroma is the reason McGregor's research-driven, anatomically extreme vocabulary became a fixture of mainstream ballet programming rather than a niche experiment - a foothold his subsequent Royal Ballet commissions, including Infra and Woolf Works, were built on.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Wayne McGregor.