Set to Malcolm Arnold’s engaging music, Kenneth MacMillan’s Solitaire, created for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet in 1956, is a light-hearted treatment of the theme of the outsider, which became...
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Donald Macleary as Prince Siegfried in the ballet Swan Lake.
Bern Schwartz, © National Portrait Gallery, London
Donald MacLeary (1927-). British dancer and ballet master
Donald MacLeary was a dancer noted for his strong finesse and natural romanticism, who had an association with The Royal Ballet for 48 years. He was born in Glasgow in 1927 and studied ballet with Sheila Ross from 1950 to 1951. He then studied at Sadler’s Wells Ballet School and joined Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet in 1954. In 1959, when Svetlana Beriosova asked for him as her regular partner, he moved to The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, becoming its youngest principal dancer at the time. MacLeary was also in demand as a partner for other ballerinas, including Lynn Seymour and Natalia Makarova.
MacLeary created many roles in works for John Cranko, including Brandenburg 4 and 6 in 1964, and for Kenneth MacMillan in The Burrow (1958), Symphony (1963) and Elite Syncopations (1974). He was ballet master for The Royal Ballet from 1976 to 1979, after retiring as a Royal Ballet dancer in 1975. MacLeary later appeared as a guest dancer for a number of companies, including Scottish Ballet. He was a répétiteur at The Royal Ballet from 1981 (for principal dancers from 1984) until his retirement in 2002. Donald MacLeary was appointed an OBE for services to dance in 2004.
First performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1928, George Balanchine’s Apollo was only the fourth work by Balanchine to enter The Royal Ballet’s repertoire after Ballet Imperial in...
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...