Kenneth MacMillan holds a peculiarly revered position within the culture of the Royal Ballet. Many junior dancers say that it’s the principal roles within his story ballets – Romeo and Juliet, Mayerling and Manon – to which they most aspire. Older dancers acknowledge that performing the MacMillan repertory has not only shaped them profoundly as artists but has stamped a collective identity on the company. MacMillan’s works may be several decades old, the Royal may be about to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death, but still there are elements of his style – his richly textured realism and his raw-edged characterisation – that dancers claim they find in no other choreographer.
Sarah Lamb, who joined the Royal from Boston Ballet in 2004, recalls how disorientating it was to perform MacMillan for the first time. As she learned the role of Juliet she found that all her ballerina habits were being systematically challenged. “I’d been trained in the Russian style, we’d been taught to always look pretty, but now I was being told ‘Don’t point your feet here!’ Kenneth wanted you to just stand. At first I was really obstinate. I didn’t see why I couldn’t emote while I was still pointing my feet. Now that I’ve been dancing his work for 12 seasons I understand the kind of naturalism he was aiming for. I realise he was trying to bring the same revolution to ballet that there had been in acting – moving away from the studied and the technical to something more visceral.”
MacMillan could always make ballet look beautiful. During the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet (1965) his heroine appears almost evanescent – her little jumps are bubbles of air, her body flies weightless into Romeo’s arms. But at other points she’s required to look gauche, even ugly. When arguing with her parents she’s a stroppy adolescent; when she steels herself to take the Friar’s potion her body convulses so violently that she looks as though she might vomit across the stage.
By the time MacMillan came to choreograph Mayerling in 1978, he was pushing far more combatively against the rules of classical artifice. The work is a portrait of Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. In representing the decadence of the late 19th-century Hapsburgs and Rudolf’s psychotic spiral into abusiveness and addiction, MacMillan wrenched the language to physical extremes – from the alienated brutality with which Rudolf manhandles his wife to the last-gasp, greedy sensuality of his duets with Mary Vetsera, his dark angel.
For the ballet’s male principal, the role of Rudolf is as exhausting mentally as it is physically. “You have to find things in yourself that you didn’t know were there,” says Edward Watson. “It’s terrifying and it’s exhilarating.”
As a senior principal, Watson has grown up through the MacMillan repertory. “They have affected the way I dance, the way I think about ballet,” he says. Even when the choreography has no obvious storyline it require dancers to reach for some kind of emotional truth or psychological hinterland. “Nothing is ever completely abstract in MacMillan’s work,” he says. “There’s always a tension between you and the music, you and the other people on stage. You always have to be thinking about how you’re going to create that atmosphere. How you’re going to be holding your shoulders, the way you go into an arabesque, fast or slow.”
Watson’s view is shared by Marianela Nuñez. Although she’s regarded as one of the company’s purest classical ballerinas – radiant, precise and magisterial in the repertories of Petipa, Balanchine or Ashton – she also cherishes the more visceral and seditious works of Macmillan: “They enable you to open yourself up and expose all kind of inner emotions.”
Dancers point to the fact that MacMillan’s characters are always complicated and flawed, allowing for an unusual freedom of interpretation. “So much is up to you,” says Lamb. “MacMillan’s genius was to give dancers the right to their own intelligence and autonomy.” One of her own choicest roles is the venal, manipulative Countess Larisch, a former mistress of Rudolf who effectively becomes his pimp. But for Lamb, Larisch is also a victim. “She’s part of this great wheel of society that is coming to end, she’s trying to survive as best as she can. And she is vulnerable because she really loves Rudolf.” There’s a similar leeway in how dancers can portray Manon (gullible girl or greedy woman) or even Rudolf (sadist or sufferer). It’s not just that MacMillan’s ballets encourage dancers to make moral and intellectual choices; they also permit an exceptional degree of physical spontaneity on stage.
William Tuckett, a choreographer in his own right and also one of the Royal’s most distinguished character artists, says that compared with the rigorously delineated choreography of Frederick Ashton or John Cranko, MacMillan allows his dancers “masses of wiggle room” – particularly in “the bits between the steps”. The way a character enters the stage, the gait of their walk, the glances and gestures that make up their interaction with other characters – all these are left unspecified. “MacMillan just provided these very broad stage directions,” explains Tuckett, “so you’re allowed to respond to the other people on stage in a very immediate, actor-based way. He galvanised the art of ballet from prescription to freedom.”
Different dancers respond to that freedom in different ways. Tuckett recalls that Sylvie Guillem could be positively unnerving. When she was dancing Manon he was often cast as the Gaoler in the ballet’s brutal prison scene. That scene ends with the Gaoler forcing Manon on to her knees to fellate him, and during one performance Guillem made herself almost impossible to catch and subdue. “She was being quite naughty that night,” chortles Tuckett, “and she really legged it around the stage. She ran in completely the opposite direction from what we’d rehearsed, I kept trying to grab her and by the end we were having to reconfigure the choreography just to catch up with the music.”
For Lamb, too, that window of spontaneity is crucial: “It never feels like a reproduction on stage, but as if it’s actually happening. I can put so much of myself into a performance that afterwards, when the curtain has gone down, I can find it difficult to return back to myself. A part of me has been left behind on the stage.”
The dancers of the Royal Ballet do not, of course, have an exclusive claim to MacMillan. For their commemorative programme this autumn they’ll be sharing the stage of the Opera House with dancers from English National Ballet, Northern Ballet Scottish Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet (who have their own historic association with MacMillan).
But the Royal do perform more MacMillan than anyone else. Many dancers believe that the interpretative demands that his ballets make on the Royal have an impact on how they perform every other ballet in the repertory.Tuckett attributes his famously maverick performances of Drosselmeyer, controller of the magical events in The Nutcracker, to the instinct for transgression he learned from MacMillan. Those traits are exhibited through the ranks, all way down to the corps de ballet. Whether they’re members of the royal court in Swan Lake or villagers in Giselle, it’s natural for the corps to flesh out their anonymous roles with subtly individual colour.
Sarah Lamb says she only realised how singular a quality this was when she danced Giselle as a guest with a Russian company. “It was so different from the Royal where everyone is genuinely feeling their character on stage. All the dancers in the Russian corps were going through the same motions – now we look concerned, now we turn, now we put our hand to our face. It felt so fake.”
“It’s lovely, the way that the Royal has kept its acting aesthetic,” affirms Tuckett. “The idea that you’re making a world on stage and that even the smallest roles are crucial.” Yet as strongly as he admires MacMillan and acknowledges the choreographer’s influence on his own career, Tuckett does believe there’s a danger of complacency in the degree to which MacMillan is venerated. He points out that there were limitations and flaws in the great man’s work – not least in his presentation of women who, for all their intriguing complexities, are almost never the agents of their own stories and almost always the victims.
Tuckett also points out that MacMillan was never able to make as radical a break from convention as his contemporary Peter Brook achieved in theatre. Despite the choreographer’s deviations from the classical language, his exploration of darkly adult material and his occasional importing of experimental elements like text and film, MacMillan left much for later generations to do in modernising the form of the story ballet.
“Our way of doing narrative still hasn’t really moved beyond the tropes of the 19th century,” says Tuckett, who thinks younger choreographers should be encouraged to challenge themselves, their dancers and their audience more robustly. “MacMillan gave ballet a massive kick in the arse but we owe it to him, now, to develop things much further.”
- Kenneth MacMillan: A National Celebration is at the Royal Opera House, London, 18 October-1 November
