1980 – Premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Gloria by The Royal Ballet

Kenneth MacMillan’s 1980 ballet Gloria is infused with personal meaning, as well as being a commentary on the futility of war, not just the Great War, which was spoken of as the ‘war to end all wars’. MacMillan’s father had been gassed at the Battle of the Somme during action and suffered the effects for the rest of his life.

The ballet, which was first performed by The Royal Ballet in 1980, used Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth as a departure point, and the cast appear as revenants, enacting a kind of ritual amidst the obliterated landscape of Andy Klunder’s set design, which evokes the ravaged fields of France during the bloodiest moments of World War One. Dressed evocatively in simple unitards and skirts for the women that feature holes and scarring to resemble damaged flesh, it is only the dancer’s headwear that really differentiates them. The men could be wearing helmets, or the hats of mediaeval pilgrims; the women could be spectres.

MacMillan’s ironic use of Francis Poulenc’s Gloria in G, a setting of Catholic Mass in praise of God, gives this lament to a lost generation a great impact. One lone man harrowingly points at the audience at the ballet’s close: passive spectators complicit in the violence, it is a theme that threads itself through many of MacMillan’s ballets. Two principal women, originally Jennifer Penney and Wendy Ellis, appear as two sides of the feminine: the latter daring and vital, the former a personification of grief. Gloria reveals MacMillan’s preoccupation with mortality and sits with works such as Song of the Earth and Requiem. MacMillan’s stark imagery, alongside Klunder’s plaintive, economic design and the force of Poulenc’s music, creates a ballet that haunts the mind. Julian Hosking was also in the original cast.