Magnus Westwell

Magnus Westwell is a Scottish artist, director and multi-instrumentalist working with choreography, composition and performance. Spanning the euphoric and desolate, Westwell’s work seeks to understand and express ineffable emotional states, transcending fragility, intimacy and catharsis in movement and sound. Exploring cycles of liminality, transcendence and absence, Westwell works within ethereal, dream-like worlds, where decaying and generative processes aim to challenge the limits of emotional and physical experience, researching ideas surrounding memory, consciousness, ephemerality, time and loss.

Magnus Westwell is a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate alumni, and their work has reached a diversity of venues, institutions and festivals across Europe and the UK, including Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Britten Pears Arts, London Short Film Festival, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Cafe OTO, Institute of the Arts Barcelona and Amsterdam Dance Event. Their digital work has been published and premiered across Nowness, Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage and FACT Magazine.

Magnus Westwell created interdisciplinary stage work Sunder, which premiered to sold out audiences at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 2022, and was subsequently released as Westwell’s debut LP. In the same year, Westwell performed for Virgil Abloh’s SS22 Louis Vuitton collection campaign, and composed the soundtrack for Paolo Carzana’s London Fashion Week show. In 2023, Westwell was commissioned by BUILDHOLLYWOOD for the opening of their new performance space in East London; Westwell developed a new 25 minute work Broken Light Of My Heart which premiered on the Autumn Equinox – it was described by culture and music journalist Emma Warren as “radical, momentous, thrilling and exceptionally moving”.

In 2024, Magnus Westwell performed with Scratchproof Orchestra at Turner Contemporary for the closing of Mark Leckey’s In The Offing; featured in Marianna Simnett’s WINNER, shot by Robbie Ryan and exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin; and collaborated with BULLYACHE, composing and performing string arrangements for their live performances at Elgar Concert Hall, Bold Tendencies, Barbican and Abbey Road Studios. Westwell was Artist in Residence at Britten Pears Arts and The Mandrake Hotel in April 2024.

Westwell’s practice unfolds through an ongoing dialogue between movement and sound, where choreography and composition evolve in response to one another. In the studio, soundtracks are composed alongside the development of choreography, with music emerging from the presence of dancers in space. This reciprocal process allows movement to shape sound as much as sound shapes movement, creating a fluid exchange between the two disciplines. Through this approach, Westwell explores cycles of memory, time, and transformation – where fleeting moments of connection are captured, fractured, and reimagined.