Kenneth MacMillan
Although he is mainly associated with the Royal Ballet, MacMillan frequently considered himself an outsider there and felt driven to work with other companies throughout his career as choreographer.
[6] With the main company now resident at Covent Garden, de Valois established a smaller ensemble to perform at Sadler's Wells and act as a training ground for young dancers and choreographers.
He was cast by Frederick Ashton, de Valois' principal choreographer, in a leading role in a new ballet, Valses nobles et sentimentales, in October 1946.
Although initially only in the corps de ballet for this work, MacMillan was unexpectedly promoted to the male lead because of injuries to all the eligible company principals.
Then followed his Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty in Margaret Dale's The Great Detective (1953); and Moondog, in Cranko's The Lady and the Fool, (1954)[10] "I stopped dancing when I was about 23 mainly because I had just terrible stage fright and I hated performing.
[n 3] De Valois gave him three months' leave of absence, during which he spent some time dancing with his friend John Cranko's small group in the little Kenton Theatre, away from the spotlight, in Henley-on-Thames.
[13] When MacMillan returned to work, his confidence as a dancer somewhat restored, he took part in de Valois' new Choreographers Group, set up in response to Marie Rambert's "Ballet Workshops".
This introduced the "outsider" character that became a hallmark of his ballets,[15] in this case a female clown who attends a ball at which her host falls in love with her until she loses the mask that has made her attractive.
[3] The critic Clement Crisp has described the piece as "a bravura display using a witty, allusive classical vocabulary, remade by a creator who knew the cinema and spoke the movement language of his generation".
For the junior company he choreographed House of Birds (1955), based on the Grimm brothers' Jorinde and Joringel,[21] and for Covent Garden he created Noctambules (1956) about a Svengali-like hypnotist.
[23] In 1956 he took leave of absence to spend five months in New York, working with American Ballet Theatre, choreographing Winter's Eve and Journey for the dramatic ballerina Nora Kaye.
[26] His 1958 work, The Burrow, with its menacing echoes of war, oppression and concealment, won praise for venturing into territory seldom explored in ballet.
[31] In The Times John Percival commented that ever since Nijinsky's original attempt in 1913 The Rite had been waiting for a choreographer who could make it work on stage, and MacMillan's was the most successful version to date.
[34] MacMillan's first full-length, three-act ballet, Romeo and Juliet (1965), to Prokofiev's score, was choreographed for Seymour and Christopher Gable, but at Webster's insistence the gala premiere was danced by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.
[35] The decision was made for commercial rather than artistic reasons: Fonteyn and Nureyev were internationally known stars and guaranteed a full house at premium prices, as well as huge publicity.
[1] For the Berlin company, MacMillan created seven ballets: Valses nobles et sentimentales, Concerto, Anastasia (one act version), The Sleeping Beauty, Olympiad, Cain and Abel and Swan Lake.
[3] His expansion of Anastasia into a three-act version (1971) and the other full-length work from this period, Manon (1974), divided opinion, receiving fiercely adverse reviews as well as laudatory ones.
It was premiered at Stuttgart, because as with Song of the Earth the Royal Opera House board thought the chosen music – Fauré's Requiem – inappropriate for a ballet.
The writer John Percival comments that MacMillan's marriage "saved him, both physically and mentally [and] gave him stability in his private life and seems to have resolved his confused sexuality".
His fourth full-length ballet, Mayerling (1978), was a dark work, portraying the suicides of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and his young mistress.
Parry comments that some scenarios for his new one-act ballets featured similarly dark themes: "a disturbed family in My Brother, My Sisters, a lunatic asylum in Playground; Valley of Shadows ... included scenes in a Nazi concentration camp.
"[1] Different Drummer (1984) was a balletic version of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, familiar to Covent Garden audiences from Berg's 1925 opera Wozzeck: all three depict the brutal fate of the downtrodden.
[49] Even the lighter of MacMillan's ballets could have their serious side: La fin du jour (1979), to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, depicts a way of life of the 1930s soon to be shattered by the Second World War, and is described by Crisp as "a requiem for the douceur de vivre of an era".
Parry, writing in The Observer, thought that the drama in the first play failed to spring fully to life;[51] Michael Billington of The Guardian praised MacMillan's "immensely detailed, atmospheric production" of the second piece.
For that company he staged new works, Wild Boy and Requiem (this time to Andrew Lloyd Webber's music rather than Fauré's), restaged his Romeo and Juliet, and created a new production of The Sleeping Beauty.
Jeremy Isaacs, the general director of the Royal Opera House, announced the death from the stage after the performance and asked the audience to rise and bow their heads and leave the theatre in silence.
