Ballet and Psychoanalysis

As a new biography of the Royal Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan by Jann Parry reveals, MacMillan's ballets are often about characters in shadowy explorations of inner states of mind. In part, his willingness to portray loneliness, sexual jealousy, greediness and violent assault in a medium usually associated with escapism and pretty fairy-tales accounts for both the attraction felt for his major ballets worldwide and also the hostility with which his efforts were greeted inside the Royal Opera House. MacMillan became an alcoholic and then dependent on prescription drugs as he struggled with depression. But is there a link between mental fragility and creative power? Psychoanalyst Dr Luis Rodríguez de la Sierra will explore this question at a symposium next Sunday in London about MacMillan's ballets.

Dr de la Sierra (who has explored ballet and psychoanalysis with dancers Irek Mukhamedov and Tamara Rojo for the Institute of Psychoanalysis) leads a team of psychoanalysts with strong personal connection and interest in ballet, while demonstrations and contributions will be given by dancers including Tamara Rojo, Edward Watson, Viviana Durante and Michael Nunn, theatre figures such as Nicholas Hytner and Nichola McAuliffe, and composer Brian Elias, who wrote the original score for MacMillan’s ballet The Judas Tree (which will be performed by the Royal Ballet this season). Here Dr de la Sierra speaks to theartsdesk about some of the issues that make MacMillan an absorbing study for psychoanalysis.



ISMENE BROWN: Which sorts of artists interest you most as a psychoanalyst?

DR LUIS DE LA SIERRA: All artists are in direct connection to the world of the unconscious but pushed, I would speak about painters - Munch, Bacon, Goya and El Greco, Lucian Freud, of course - while in ballet the one that stands out is Kenneth MacMillan. I first saw his work when I was a medical student in Barcelona and I saw a film of his Romeo and Juliet with Fonteyn and Nureyev. I had seen the old Bolshoi version, and I thought I saw something new here, something different, though I was too young to identify what it was then. What strikes me now is the facility with which he is able to portray in dancing steps intense emotions, such as love, hatred, envy, jealousy. The power he has to convey something that the spectator