Kenneth MacMillan Died 20 Years Ago

It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely been held to be the realm of sweetness and majesty. The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan brought the values of modern theatre, cinema and the sexual revolution to ballet, and his narrative daring remains unequalled by any choreographer in Britain after him. In fact, possibly cowed by his mastery in that department, choreographers after him have fled towards abstract and even asexual codes of movement, with only an occasional twitch towards storytelling by a bold soul willing to run the gauntlet of odious comparisons.

Tomorrow the Royal Ballet displays a trio of MacMillan's ballets to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. He collapsed backstage on 29 October 1992 during the final act of an astounding performance of Mayerling starring Irek Mukhamedov. It was a shockingly dramatic night. The Royal Opera House chief Jeremy Isaacs came onstage at curtain call to announce the news and prevent applause. The audience, already wrung out by the performance of the harrowing ballet, dispersed in horrified silence.

A public that is now well familiar with his full-length ballet-dramas Romeo and Juliet, Manon and Mayerling will encounter three contrasting examples of MacMillan's versatility on the bill: a pure classical dance to music (Concerto) and an expressive elegy on the death of his friend, the choreographer John Cranko (Requiem), as well as a rarely seen gem of fierce storytelling from his early career, Las Hermanas, based upon Garcia Lorca's play, The House of Bernarda Alba, about the devastation wrought by the arrival of a virile man in a house of repressed women.

MacMillan's uninhibited balletic way with sex was one of his most noted qualities, bending and exploiting the traditional forms of balletic pas de deux and pas d'action in unmistakable narrative statements; unlike a classical pas de deux, which behaves rather like a baroque opera duet by using technical skills to circle expressively around a single emotional moment, a MacMillan duet will have its own story within, moving from flirtation to consummation, or from innocence to violence, or from repression to confession. In this new emotional nakedness in ballet, he was following his young man's passion for New Wave cinema as it leapt into modernity with the Fifties and Sixties; he even used balletic versions of freeze-frames and jump-cuts.

It was often in his short ballets that he exposed his most adventurous originality and took the greatest risks with his dancers

Only a handful of his most famous ballets are commercially filmed, but it was often in his balletic short-stories and novellas that MacMillan exposed his most adventurous originality and took the greatest risks with his dancers. Although a product of the Royal Ballet schooling (he was joyful to have joined the company just in time to get taken on the groundbreaking Sadler's Wells Ballet tour to New York in 1949 that made the company's global breakthrough), he was already showing a distinctly modern personality in his early choreography, with a strong inclination to explore the darkness of the human soul and disturbing subjects, influenced by his oppressively unhappy childhood and wartime upbringing.

One such was his early mini-drama The Burrow, which he made in 1957 when he was 29, swirling between myriad influences - from his very successful classical dancing career to his love of nouvelle vague cinema to his recent head-turning return to New York where major ballerinas seized on his talent. "I'm sick to death of fairy stories," he angrily told a newspaper. He fixed upon Anne Frank's wartime diary of concealment in her home, praying not to be discovered by the Gestapo, but created his own scenario influenced by Franz Kafka's final short story, The Burrow. He choreographed Frank Martin's taut music with a physical style that appears much more like modern dance than ballet in the film clips shown here of the original cast. The subject of persecution, of the community from outside or of the individual from within him/herself, would resurface constantly in his ballets throughout his career. In this extract uploaded by Nick Wallace-Smith from a television documentary about his career, MacMillan starts talking after 13 seconds of stills and silence. (The Burrow was last performed by the Royal Ballet in 1959.)

The central girl in The Burrow was a very young Canadian dancer, Lynn Seymour, who disparagingly described her own body as made of marshmallow, but whose uninhibited dancing became MacMillan's greatest inspiration. Little is preserved on film of this remarkable performer, but it was her dramatic derring-do that emboldened MacMillan, in The Invitation in 1960, to break all taboos in ballet and portray an Edwardian house-party at which a young girl is raped by an older guest. Aided by the contrast of the chilly Matyas Seiber music against Nicholas Georgiadis's lush period designs, Seymour's innocent urgency and raggedy-doll pliability let loose in the choreographer's mind new expressive possibilities in pas de deux that he would use to increasingly exciting (or disturbing) effect.

In this second extract from the television documentary, MacMillan, Seymour and Ninette de Valois (the Royal Ballet's director who spotted and encouraged MacMillan as a choreographer) talk about the impact of The Invitation, and that notorious rape scene - which de Valois originally asked him to cut out - is performed by its original cast, Seymour and Desmond Doyle. Again this clip starts with still photos for about 35 seconds. (The Invitation was last performed by the Royal Ballet in 1996.)

Next page: Las Hermanas, Concerto, Gloria, Manon, Mayerling, Elite Syncopations