Dance is an ephemeral art. It keeps few proper records of its products. Reputations are written in rumours and reviews. And by reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet — its destroyer, if you listen to some.
They think this country’s classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld. It’s an absurd reduction, since Ashton was quite as screwed up as MacMillan, but the notion persists of the two of them embodying opposite sides of the British ballet coin, order and chaos.
Both giants left the Royal Ballet dozens and dozens of ballets, which critics recorded were amazing things. But since their deaths 29 and 25 years ago, the giants have been generally edited down to a manageable, commercially productive core around the big storyballets: MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and Manon, and Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée and (at a pinch) Sylvia.
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