Seeing the light | 19 October 2017

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. But what to do about the dozens of short, more contemporarily interesting ballets. It’s been a cautionary, tragic tale to see how, since Ashton’s death, the large majority of his works have been pronounced officially extinct.

Given the rather melancholy note that most of these anniversaries tend to strike, this 25th anniversary of MacMillan’s death is finally giving us something to celebrate. A brave decision appears to have been made by the Royal Ballet to hand over the key to its cupboards to others who might be more curious.

Ballets are fragile texts, and revivals, such as Different Drummer and Isadora, have often gone badly, rather tempering enthusiasm for exploring further MacMillan’s famously ‘difficult’ oeuvre. And yet we can see from here, decades later, that MacMillan’s work, like that of Ashton, forms the creative and stylistic backbone of the great art of British ballet.