Dying of the light

It’s a comfort that the creation of a new ballet inspired by French court entertainment can still happen in the amnesiac ballet country that Britain has become. The idea of making a modern-day meditation on the first ballet — Louis XIV’s 12-hour epic Le Ballet de la nuit (1653) — is as intellectual as Wayne McGregor’s roping in of cognitive science as source material. It faces many of the same traps when it comes to capturing that elusive necessity: theatricality. Only David Bintley could do this, deploying his artistic authority as the 20-year director of Birmingham Royal Ballet as any French despot would.

The scheme’s theatricality is innate. Le Ballet de la nuit starred the 14-year-old Louis. He had been king already for a decade and was prodigiously sure of his self-image as the sun struggling to be born through the turbulence of the night. In The King Dances Bintley produces a nice parallel metaphor.