Magnus Westwell is a Scottish artist and director working with choreography, composition and performance. Spanning the euphoric and desolate, Westwell’s work seeks to understand and express states of cathartic transformation through embodied sound.
Exploring cycles of liminality, transcendence, and absence, Westwell creates expansive, ethereal environments where decaying and generative processes challenge the limits of emotional, physical, and sonic experience. At the core of the work is an exploration of thresholds - the moments when sustained tension, repetition, and risk push both performers and audience to a tipping point. Through cascading states of collapse and transformation, works examine fragility, conflict, damage, consciousness, ephemerality, time, and loss. 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, sound works 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 cyclical exchange between the disciplines. Westwell’s practice has been shaped by time living in Orkney, London, and Glasgow, where they are currently based.
Magnus Westwell is a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate alumni, and their work has reached a diversity of venues, institutions, galleries and festivals across Europe and the UK, including Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, London Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Britten Pears Arts, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Cafe OTO, The Royal Society of Arts, Number 1 Main Road Berlin, Institute of the Arts Barcelona and Amsterdam Dance Event, with digital work published and premiered across Nowness, Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage and FACT Magazine.
In 2022, Magnus Westwell premiered interdisciplinary stage work Sunder to sold-out audiences at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Its soundtrack, separately released as an LP, was performed live across the UK and played on BBC Radio 3. 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 25 minute work Broken Light Of My Heart which premiered on the Autumn Equinox, described by culture and music journalist Emma Warren as “radical, momentous, thrilling and exceptionally moving”.
Westwell performed with Scratchproof Orchestra at Turner Contemporary for the closing of Mark Leckey’s In The Offing; featured in Marianna Simnett’s WINNER, exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and collaborated with BULLYACHE, composing and performing string arrangements for their live performances at Elgar Concert Hall, Bold Tendencies, Southbank Centre, Barbican and Abbey Road Studios. Westwell was Artist in Residence at Britten Pears Arts and The Mandrake Hotel in 2024.
Magnus Westwell premiered solo performance work Caught at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in 2025, later presenting the work at FOLD during Frieze London, and at VIMA Art Fair in Cyprus. Combining choreography and live musical performance, Caught is realised through sonically layered, ethereal environments in which the body moves through emotional states to the point of catharsis. Westwell presented WEIGHT, a duo exhibition with British painter Marcus Nelson at Number 1 Main Road, Berlin. The exhibition featured Westwell’s experimental short films And Then Gone and Cycles (III), which were later exhibited at The Royal Society of Arts.
Magnus Westwell is currently developing a new ensemble work - Caught Hold of Nothing - which will preview at Edinburgh Art Festival on 14 August 2026, and tour from 2027 onwards.
