Kenneth MacMillan

Sir Kenneth MacMillan (11 December 1929 29 October 1992) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer who was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977, and its principal choreographer from 1977 until his death. Earlier he had served as director of ballet for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He was also associate director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1984 to 1989, and artistic associate of the Houston Ballet from 1989 to 1992.

From a family with no background of dance or music, MacMillan was determined from an early age to become a dancer. The director of Sadler's Wells Ballet, Ninette de Valois, accepted him as a student and then a member of her company. In the late 1940s, MacMillan built a successful career as a dancer, but, plagued by stage fright, he abandoned it while still in his twenties. After this he worked entirely as a choreographer; he created ten full-length ballets and more than fifty one-act pieces. In addition to his work for ballet companies he was active in television, musicals, non-musical drama, and opera.

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. His creations for the Stuttgart Ballet and the Deutsche Opera ballet include some of his most frequently revived works.

Life and career Early years MacMillan was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, the youngest of four surviving children his assignment was to establish permanent opera and ballet companies for the house. He set about building the opera company from scratch but persuaded de Valois to make Covent Garden the main base for her ballet company. In 1946, while still a student, MacMillan appeared in the production of The Sleeping Beauty with which Webster and de Valois reopened the opera house. At first he was a non-dancing extra, and later he was promoted to a small dancing role. 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. In April 1946 MacMillan was a founder member, and quickly made progress. 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. The success of the piece encouraged Ashton to revive his 1933 Les Rendezvous.

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. His biographer Jann Parry comments that he was able to take over without notice because he had a rare ability to remember and reproduce the steps of every dancer in any piece in which he appeared. He was promoted to the senior Covent Garden company at the start of the 1948–49 season, touring in Europe and dancing Florestan in the third act pas de trois of The Sleeping Beauty in the company's opening gala in New York in October 1949.

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. Cranko, himself a former dancer who had moved to choreography, concluded that MacMillan might well follow the same course. 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". For this group, MacMillan choreographed his first ballet, Somnambulism, which was first given on 1 February 1953. It was well received, and the next year he followed with another small-scale work, Laiderette. This introduced the "outsider" character that became a hallmark of his ballets, 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. MacMillan's eclectic choice of music was evidenced in these two early works; the first was danced to jazz composed by Stan Kenton, and the second was to the harpsichord music of Frank Martin.

On the strength of the workshop successes, de Valois commissioned the 25-year-old MacMillan to create a ballet for performance at Sadler's Wells. Danses concertantes, to music by Stravinsky, was first produced in January 1955, with designs by Nicholas Georgiadis, with whom MacMillan collaborated extensively over the next years. 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". With the success of Danses concertantes MacMillan concluded that his future lay in choreography rather than dancing. After a fierce argument with de Valois, who wanted him to continue in both capacities, he got his way, and from 1955 his contract with the company (on a slightly reduced salary) was purely as a choreographer. His only Covent Garden appearances as a dancer after that were two performances as an Ugly Step-sister in Cinderella alongside Ashton in 1956.

Choreographer MacMillan next produced a series of one-act ballets. For the junior company he choreographed House of Birds (1955), based on the Grimm brothers' Jorinde and Joringel, and for Covent Garden he created Noctambules (1956) about a Svengali-like hypnotist. He also worked in television, with Punch and the Child (1954), The Dreamers, a television adaptation of Sonambulism, and Turned Out Proud (1955). 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.

MacMillan was the first of his generation of choreographers to have an entire evening of his works presented by the Sadler's Wells Ballet. In June 1956 his new "divertissement ballet" Solitaire was given in a quadruple bill with Somnambulism, House of Birds and Danses concertantes. His 1958 work, The Burrow, with its menacing echoes of war, oppression and concealment, won praise for venturing into territory seldom explored in ballet. The critic in The Times admitted that its dramatic impact was strong enough "to make one glad when it ends". The work marked the beginning of MacMillan's association with Lynn Seymour, who was his muse for many subsequent ballets.

In the late 1950s MacMillan choreographed two musicals: one for the stage (The World of Paul Slickey, 1958) and one for the cinema (Expresso Bongo, 1959). The Invitation, first shown at the Royal Opera House on 30 December 1960, is probably MacMillan's most controversial ballet. This one-act work about rape was interpreted by Lynn Seymour and Desmond Doyle and provoked, at the time, mixed reactions in the press and the audience. Among MacMillan's works for the Royal Ballet in the early 1960s was The Rite of Spring (1962); he selected an unknown junior dancer, Monica Mason, to dance the lead role of the chosen maiden who dances herself to death in a primitive ritual. Dance and Dancers described it as "a singular and signal triumph"; Mason's performance was judged "brilliantly done ... one of British ballet's most memorable performances". 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.

In the mid-1960s two of his ballets, though both immensely successful, strained relations between MacMillan and the Royal Opera House management. In 1964 Webster and the Covent Garden board turned down MacMillan's proposal to create a ballet using the music of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde The Song of the Earth; the decision was made on the grounds that the score was unsuitable for use as a ballet. Cranko, by now in charge of the Stuttgart Ballet, invited MacMillan to create the work there in 1965. It was a huge success, and within six months the Royal Ballet had taken the piece up. 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. 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. In Parry's words, MacMillan and his two chosen dancers felt betrayed. MacMillan discovered that at the Berlin house there was no doubt that the ballet was given distinctly lower priority. He did not speak German, which reduced his enjoyment from watching films (of which he was a great devotee) and theatre and limited him generally in everyday life. Although he had taken several colleagues with him, including Seymour, many moved away over the course of his nearly four years in charge, and MacMillan became increasingly isolated. It was the first time he had been in a managerial as well as a creative role, and the strain affected his physical and mental health. He smoked and drank heavily and suffered a minor stroke. Webster retired in the same year and wanted a wholesale change of management to coincide with his own departure. For the opera he arranged the joint directorship of Colin Davis and Peter Hall, and for the ballet he secured MacMillan and John Field as co-directors. Neither of the joint directorships succeeded. Hall did not take up his post, instead moving to run the National Theatre, and Field, who had run the junior Royal Ballet company under de Valois and Ashton, found the split directorship untenable and left within months to become director of ballet at La Scala, Milan.

MacMillan was in an awkward position. It was widely known that Ashton had been forced out, and many resented it. Company morale was lowered by an announcement, to which MacMillan and Field were party, that the two ballet companies would merge, with numerous job losses. The managerial side of the post was no more congenial to MacMillan than it had been in Berlin, and some felt that his creative work suffered during his seven-year term. The latter was dedicated to the memory of Cranko, who had died suddenly in 1973. 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 work was not given at Covent Garden until 1983.

At the age of 42 MacMillan, hitherto unmarried and enigmatic about his personal life, married the 26-year-old Australian painter Deborah Williams. 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". MacMillan took up the post of principal choreographer. 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." 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".

In the 1980s MacMillan ventured into non-balletic theatre, directing productions of Strindberg's The Dance of Death (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 1983) and Tennessee Williams's Kingdom of Earth (Hampstead Theatre, 1984). Parry, writing in The Observer, thought that the drama in the first play failed to spring fully to life; Michael Billington of The Guardian praised MacMillan's "immensely detailed, atmospheric production" of the second piece. From 1984 to 1989, while remaining chief choreographer of the Royal Ballet, MacMillan was associate director of the American Ballet Theatre. 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. MacMillan reverted to classical ballet for the piece, creating a fairy-tale work far from his accustomed style. The result was not judged among his best works, but it marked the emergence of the 19-year-old Darcey Bussell, whom he picked to dance the young heroine. Along with the former Bolshoi principal dancer Irek Mukhamedov, who joined the Royal Ballet in 1991, Bussell was MacMillan's final important muse. For the two of them he created Winter Dreams (1991), inspired by Chekhov's Three Sisters. Mukhamedov was the brutish male leading character in MacMillan's last ballet, The Judas Tree (1992).

MacMillan's Houston Ballet connection began under Artistic Director Ben Stevenson, an old friend from their Sadler's Wells days, who brought him on as Artistic Associate in 1989. In just three years, MacMillan enriched the repertoire with Song of the Earth, Gloria, Elite Syncopations, and Solitaire. He was preparing to stage Manon L'histoire_de_Manon in Houston before his death in 1992. Manon premiered on stage posthumously in 1994, and Mayerling followed in 2017, cementing his lasting legacy at Houston Ballet.

MacMillan died from a heart attack backstage at the Royal Opera House during a performance of Mayerling. 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. On the same night the junior company was presenting MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet in Birmingham. MacMillan had nearly finished work on the dances for a new production of Carousel by the National Theatre, which opened at the Lyttelton Theatre six weeks later, with his family and many of his friends in the audience.

Choreography Full-length ballets Title Year Company Composerasterisk denotes specially-written works Principal performers Designer Notes Romeo and Juliet 1965 Royal Ballet Prokofiev Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, David Blair, Desmond Doyle, Anthony Dowell, Derek Rencher, Michael Somes Nicholas Georgiadis Made on Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, but the premiere was danced by Fonteyn and Nureyev The Sleeping Beauty 1967 Deutsche Oper Ballet Tchaikovsky Lynn Seymour, Rudolf Holz, Vergie Derman, Hannelore Peters, Marion Cito, Barry Kay Production after Marius Petipa Swan Lake 1969 Deutsche Oper Ballet Tchaikovsky Lynn Seymour, Frank Frey, Gerhard Bohner Nicholas Georgiadis Production after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov Anastasia 1971 Royal Ballet Tchaikovsky, Symphonies No 1 and No3; Martinů, Fantaisies symphoniques; and Electronic music by Fritz Winckel and Rüdiger Rüfer Lynn Seymour, Svetlana Beriosova, Antoinette Sibley, Derek Rencher, Anthony Dowell, Gerd Larsen, Vergie Derman, Jennifer Penney, Lesley Collier, David Wall Barry Kay Expanded version of one-act ballet of the same name (1967) – see below TheSleepingBeauty 1973 Royal Ballet Tchaikovsky Antoinette Sibley, Anthony Dowell, Leslie Edwards, Gerd Larsen, Deanne Bergsma, Jennifer Penney Peter Farmer Production after Marius Petipa Manon 1974 Royal Ballet Massenet, music from various operas, arranged by Leighton Lewis Antoinette Sibley, Anthony Dowell, David Wall, Monica Mason, Derek Rencher, David Drew Nicholas Georgiadis Mayerling 1978 Royal Ballet Liszt, orchestral and piano works, arr John Lanchbery David Wall, Lynn Seymour, Merle Park, Georgina Parkinson, Michael Somes Nicholas Georgiadis Isadora 1981 Royal Ballet Richard Rodney Bennett* Merle Park, Derek Deane, Julian Hosking, Derek Rencher Barry Kay Mary Miller, acting, non-dancing role The Sleeping Beauty 1987 American Ballet Theatre Tchaikovsky Susan Jaffe, Robert Hill, Leslie Browne, Victor Barbee, Marianna Tcherkassky, Johan Renvall Nicholas Georgiadis Production after Marius Petipa The Prince of the Pagodas 1989 Royal Ballet Britten Darcey Bussell, Jonathan Cope, Tetsuya Kumakawa, Fiona Chadwick, Anthony Dowell Nicholas Georgiadis

Shorter works

Sources: Royal Opera House performance database, Parry, and Kenneth MacMillan website.

Notes, references and sources