Podcast » Mark Morris
American dancer, choreographer and director Mark Morris is one of the most successful and influential of contemporary modern choreographers.
decade » 1970s
Podcast » Antoinette Sibley
Antoinette Sibley talks with Alastair Macaulay. Her wonderful mix of enthusiasm, appreciation and practicality typify the glorious mercurial talent that has beguiled a generation of dancers and...
Podcast » Violette Verdy
This interview with Violette Verdy is introduced by the dance critic and historian Alastair Macaulay. Violette Verdy’s laughter and intelligence shine through in this discussion with Clement...
Timeline Event » 1970 – Kenneth MacMillan becomes director of The Royal Ballet
Frederick Ashton ceased being director of The Royal Ballet in 1970 under controversial circumstances. The new director, Kenneth MacMillan, was to have shared the job with John Field, but when it...
Timeline Event » 1970 – The Royal Ballet dances Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering for the first time
Dances at a Gathering, which had been created for New York City Ballet in 1969, represented the first work by Jerome Robbins to enter The Royal Ballet’s repertoire. Danced to music by Frédéric...
Timeline Event » 1970 – The Royal Ballet Touring Company becomes The Royal Ballet New Group (later renamed Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet)
The Royal Ballet went through a period of re-organisation in 1970, attempting to integrate the Covent Garden and Touring sections of the company. The core of the dancers would remain at Covent...
Glen Tetley’s Field Figures, a world premiere for The Royal Ballet New Group in 1970, signalled a radical shift in repertoire for the newly renamed and re-formed company towards contemporary dance;...
First performed in 1970 at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, for his Giselle Peter Darrell directed an unusually logical treatment of the drama and adapted the traditional choreography to fit a...
Timeline Event » 1971 – Premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s three-act version of Anastasia by The Royal Ballet
Anastasia was originally choreographed in 1967 by Kenneth MacMillan as a one-act ballet for Lynn Seymour and the Deutsche Oper Ballet Berlin, with music by Bohuslav Martinů and designs by Barry Kay....
New London Ballet was a classical company of 14 dancers formed by Galina Samsova and André Prokovsky that toured extensively in Britain and overseas with a repertory consisting mostly of newly...
Timeline Event » 1971 – Premiere of Peter Darrell’s Othello by New London Ballet
In 1971 Peter Darrell took Shakespeare’s tragedy and conceived Othello, a powerful and dramatic one-act ballet for New London Ballet. It was later performed by Scottish Ballet in 1978. The...
For her production of Giselle for London Festival Ballet in 1971, Mary Skeaping attempted to return to ballet as far back to its original sources as possible. With choreography by Jean Coralli, Jules...
Timeline Event » 1972 – Premiere of Peter Darrell’s The Tales of Hoffmann by Scottish Theatre Ballet
Peter Darrell’s The Tales of Hoffmann, created for Scottish Theatre Ballet at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, in 1972, used music arranged by John Lanchbery from the opera by Jacques Offenbach to...
Timeline Event » 1973 – David Gayle’s Yorkshire Ballet Seminars established
David Gayle danced with The Royal Ballet in the 1960’s and, on leaving the company, was the very first man to enrol on the newly formed Teacher Training Course at The Royal Ballet School. He...
Timeline Event » 1973 – Premiere of Jack Carter’s Three Dances to Japanese Music by Scottish Theatre Ballet
Three Dances to Japanese Music. Three Dances to Japanese Music is a ballet originally choreographed by Jack Carter for Scottish Ballet after he had spent some time working in Japan. It consists of...
In 1973, Scottish Theatre Ballet presented a new production of The Nutcracker. Using Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score, Darrell created largely new choreography, but retained the original dances by...
Timeline Event » 1974 – Premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon by The Royal Ballet
The eponymous heroine of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 Manon has become a role that nearly all aspiring ballerinas long to dance. Though there was initial criticism of the seemingly one-dimensional...
An all-male work choreographed in 1974 by Robert North for London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Troy Game playfully ridicules muscle-bound machismo whilst also offering its cast plenty of bravura...
Kenneth Macmillan’s hugely popular Elite Syncopations emerged out of a newfound enthusiasm for ragtime music in the 1970s. Danced to music by Scott Joplin and others, MacMillan’s subversive side...
Jerome Robbins’ exploration of Frédéric Chopin found a comic outlet in The Concert, originally performed by New York City Ballet in 1956 and staged by The Royal Ballet in 1975. Audience-members...
A Month in the Country was created in 1976 by Frederick Ashton for The Royal Ballet. It was based on the play by Ivan Turgenev, and was almost more than 40 years in gestation. It was pushed on its...
Following the departure of Laverne Meyer, Northern Dance Theatre appoints Robert de Warren as new artistic director.
Timeline Event » 1977 – The Royal Ballet New Group becomes Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet with Peter Wright as director
Peter Wright studied ballet with Kurt Jooss, Vera Volkova and Peggy van Praagh. After dancing with several companies, including Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, he became director of the Sadler’s...
Rudolf Nureyev’s version of Romeo and Juliet for London Festival Ballet is highly cinematic, sumptuous and colourful, and emphasises the inevitability of the couple’s tragic fate while also...
Timeline Event » 1977 – Norman Morrice becomes director of The Royal Ballet
After Kenneth MacMillan stepped down as artistic director of The Royal Ballet in 1977, the company appointed Norman Morrice who had, until then, been primarily associated as a choreographer and...
Christopher Bruce’s Cruel Garden is a powerful work in two acts; a surreal fantasy based on the life of the Spanish poet Gabriel García Lorca, who was murdered by General Franco’s Nationalist...
Timeline Event » 1978 – London City Ballet founded by Harold King
London-based London City Ballet was established in 1978 by South African-born dancer Harold King, giving lunchtime performances with an initial collection of only eight dancers. During the 1980s the...
Timeline Event » 1978 – First seaon of Dance Umbrella Festival under Val Bourne
Val Bourne danced with Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet, but by 1976 was working within the Arts Council. She was inspired, along with other colleagues, to establish an initiative to support British...
Timeline Event » 1978 – Premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling by The Royal Ballet
With his fourth three-act ballet, Mayerling, Kenneth MacMillan cemented his legacy for reinvigorating the full-length narrative ballet for the modern age. Mayerling, first performed by The Royal...
Timeline Event » 1979 – John Field becomes director of London Festival Ballet
Following the departure of Beryl Grey, John Field was appointed the new artistic director of London Festival Ballet.
Timeline Event » 1979 – London Festival Ballet dances Peter Schaufuss’ production of La Sylphide for the first time
The ballet that best epitomises Romantic ballet, La Sylphide was first performed in Paris in 1831. Created by the choreographer and ballet master Filippo Taglioni as a vehicle for his daughter, the...
Grace Note » …and on: Fashion & Ballet in Step
Fashion and ballet have a symbiotic relationship, each drawing on the other. Twice a year, fashion designers must cast around for hot influences. These might come from anywhere but time and again,...
Photography has continually transformed itself, like all the other arts. How has this affected the photography of ballet? When I joined Scottish Ballet in 1977 Peter Darrell organised a Choreographic...
Grace Note » 1970s: Adapting Adaptations
Many ballets adapt themes and short stories from other media. But the challenges and problems of adaptation are not confined to ballet. Adapt or die is a rule of life. Of art, too. We can’t go on...
Grace Note » 1940s onwards: The Wartime Quartet
It wasn’t only in ballet that women were leading British ballet forward. But in philosophy too, four redoubtable women change the face of the subject. G. E. M. Anscombe (1919 – 2001),...
Grace Note » 1920s – 1950s: Neo-Romanticism and After
According to Virginia Woolf, ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’. The event from 1910 she was referring to was the famous exhibition entitled ‘Manet and the...