The Royal Ballet presents MacMillan Celebrated, a programme of works on both the Main Stage and Linbury Theatre celebrating the work of the company’s former Director and Principal Choreographer, Kenneth MacMillan.
He was the director of The Royal Ballet from 1970 to 1977 and Principal Choreographer from 1977 to 1992. MacMillan reshaped the identity of The Royal Ballet by creating works that reflected real-life emotions, passions and human frailty. His legacy of narrative ballets including Romeo and Juliet, Mayerling and Manon are regarded as masterpieces of 20th-century ballet.
Three one-act ballets on the Main Stage will show the breadth of MacMillan’s vision during his lifetime: Danses Concertantes, Different Drummer and Requiem.
Danses Concertantes, MacMillan’s first work for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, was commissioned by Ninette de Valois in 1955, and marked the start of his collaboration with the designer Nicholas Georgiadis. An early indicator of the incredible artistic output that would follow, the ballet’s critical success spurred MacMillan to abandon performing in favour of choreography. This revival features debut performances from across the Company including Royal Ballet Principals Anna Rose O’Sullivan, Mayara Magri and Vadim Muntagirov.
Different Drummer is a fragmentary retelling of George Büchner’s play Woyzeck about the moving plight of a soldier driven to despair and murder. This revival sees debuts by Marcelino Sambé and Reece Clarke as Woyzeck, Francesca Hayward and Natalia Osipova as Marie, and Francisco Serrano and David Donnelly as the Drum Major. Set to a score by Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg, the ballet’s themes of poverty, exploitation and infidelity stand as an “unflinching and timeless portrait of fragility in the face of trauma”.
The programme concludes with Requiem, a tribute to MacMillan’s friend and former Royal Ballet dancer and choreographer John Cranko. Set to Gabriel Fauré’s score, Requiem received its Stuttgart Ballet premiere in 1976 and entered The Royal Ballet’s repertory in 1983. This revival features principal dancers Lauren Cuthbertson, Sarah Lamb, Marianela Nuñez, Matthew Ball, William Bracewell and Ryoichi Hirano among the cast.
Complementing the programme on the Main Stage, Yorke Dance Project will perform California Connections: Three Pioneering Women in the Linbury Theatre on 21 and 22 March. This programme includes a reworking of MacMillan’s Isadora, his homage to the ‘Mother of Modern Dance’, Isadora Duncan. Yolande Yorke-Edgell and Deborah MacMillan have distilled the original ballet into an intensely theatrical one-act chamber work which explores the conflict between Isadora’s search for love and her mission to revolutionise the art of dance. The original score is by Richard Rodney Bennett.
Photo Album – Kenneth MacMillan’s Requiem
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.