Sir Kenneth MacMillan, choreographer to the Royal Ballet, has died.
He collapsed backstage during the performance of his ballet,
Mayerling, at the Royal Opera House last night.
Sir Kenneth, who was 62,
was one of the most important choreographers this century.
He created great roles for Britain's leading ballerinas,
from Margot Fonteyn to more recent stars like Darcey Bussell.
He came up to me before the performance,
and he says, "Just do it.
"Do it for me. Do the whole ballet for me."
I really wanted to hear him saying something to me at the end.
It was important that he would say to me, "You did it."
We never got to that stage.
I can see him now.
He was the first dead person I'd ever seen.
I would have done anything for him.
Absolutely anything.
He was a whole world to me.
I was in that performance of Mayerling,
and I was playing Mizzi Kaspar.
It was a very odd feeling to lose
somebody that affected so many people's lives.
To know that we were all there,
and...nobody could help him,
because we were all performing his work, you know,
it's just...
I don't know...
Maybe that's better, that it was like that.
It just feels odd.
There he was, laughing and joking with me before we went to our seats.
That was the last time I saw him,
the last time I said anything to him.
Life is very cruel.
You know, Kenneth
choreographed life.
In real life.
Not in a romantic way, not in a fairy tale... Life has amazing,
beautiful love moments, it has some tragic moments,
and it has death. That is part of life.
You can't live life without death.
It's impossible.
It all happened too soon. He was only 62.
He was starting to explore all sorts of things.
What would he have done if he'd stayed alive?
I think it's sad that I was one of the closest people in his life,
and I'm the only one that wasn't there.
It seems like the whole world was at
the Royal Opera House the night he died.
But in a funny sort of way, it's kind of...
Kind of... How else could he have died, really?
It was kind of extraordinary.
Being at work, doing his ballets, and...
..being able to express himself
through that was the most important thing.
I'd had a fairly dramatic life as a young person.
Both my parents died when I was very young.
We were quite a poor family.
Eventually, we settled in Great Yarmouth,
which is on the east coast.
I like the cinema very much.
When I was younger, I used to go twice a day, when I had the time.
I saw Fred Astaire in movies,
and I must say I thought he was wonderful.
And that's what I wanted to be.
So I went to a local dancing school,
ostensibly to learn tap dancing.
And they said, "How about ballet?"
And I said, "How about ballet?
"Boys don't do ballet."
I am very interested in people, and I wanted to portray...
..the dilemma of people living, working, and being with each other.
I wanted to show that kind of thing in ballet.
The way he wanted his dancers to move, to look at each other,
to touch each other, to dance
with each other, it's like...
It's flesh and bones.
It's not, like, oh, they look, but they don't look at each other.
You know, they kind of look, but they don't look.
They don't see.
They don't see each other.
I think when you dance Kenneth well, you have to see each other.
Directly.
And you have to touch each other,
and you're not just caressing like a little ballerina,
and that becomes real.
The fundamental thing about relationships between men and women
is always sexual.
I mean, whether it be overt or hidden.
But it has to be some kind of sexual tension
between a man and a woman.
I think Kenneth believed sex was the, sort of...
..linchpin of life. You know,
if you don't have strong sex,
and you don't have sexual relationships
and relationships between people
on stage that indicate that, you're short-changing it.
Which didn't mean that he was, you know, a ravening sexual beast -
he wasn't! But he did feel very strongly that these stories
were arranged around this core fact.
There have to be highlights in a ballet.
All the highlights are the pas de deux.
That's part of my ethos.
When I do a ballet, I choreograph the pas de deux first.
So I know at what height they are.
And then underneath that, then I do everything else...
..so that they do become the highlights of the ballet.
Romeo and Juliet,
we could tell
that he was excited about it.
It came floating out of him.
And the wonderful thing about it was it made dancers act.
And not just be dancers.
From the word go, he's telling a story,
and he tells it amazingly well.
In choreography, people were interested in the purely
decorative side of ballet.
And I was not.
Somehow, I want ballet to be in touch more with reality.
For the start of the pas de deux, I mean,
they are holding each other's hands.
They are walking towards the audience,
and they don't know what they are going to do.
You can tell...
..that they're young lovers, and, "What do I do next?"
I mean, it's all brilliant.
There's moments of, you know, hardly
any movement that are so effective.
Where Juliet just sits on the bed, and just breathes.
As a dancer, that is the hardest thing to do, is not move.
To see how Kenneth knew how that would carry.
The wonderful contrast he was able to create.
How he was able to tell a story still flabbergasts me.
Kenneth said, "Sex and death. That's what I do."
That really sums it up.
I think there was really no aspect of human nature...
..that he...
..was afraid to explore in choreographic terms.
As hideous and ugly...
..and really seriously horrible as that might be,
he would go there.
And you'd better be prepared to go with him.
I remember the first time I saw Kenneth's ballet, The Invitation.
It was the rape scene
that was absolutely hair-raising.
It was something horrific expressed through dance.
Boy, did it express it.
And I think today
it still remains one of the most electrifying pieces of choreography,
expressing a really horrific part of life.
It didn't lie. There was no everyone turning their back
to the audience while something nasty happened.
He doesn't pretty something up.
He does not use euphemisms.
He does not...
..swindle the audience out of the truth as he sees it.
There is what happens.
There was, I think, always in MacMillan's work something dark,
which responded to his own psyche, I guess.
It was on the stage in the 60s, and it caused a sensation.
Things were happening in the theatre and on film,
and I think he was always just stunned
that the ballet expectation was still rather polite.
Ballet was still stuck in an age
where being dressed head to toe in Dior,
as Margot Fonteyn was, and the sort of
fairy tale story of the ballet dancer was still very important.
So for this person to come in, and start saying, "No,
"I want to do a ballet about rape.
"And I'm not prepared to let it happen offstage.
"I want it on stage..."
That was one of his first ballets.
I mean, it wasn't alarming for me.
I think it was a, sort of, natural progression.
But it also showed, I think, someone with a very strong opinion.
My opinion. I think a lot of people
thought I was too young to have an opinion
about what ballet should be about.
A little bit more.
A little bit more...
So that you really are focusing on your foot.
I met him first of all as a very young dancer,
when I first joined the Royal Ballet.
Let's go from...
Just a little lead in, please.
And he was the up-and-coming talent.
And Kenneth was very much wanting to make his mark.
I sensed that his talent was special.
He also never explained his ballets.
He never went into great lengthy descriptions.
He never told anybody what he was going to do before he started.
Yes.
OK. All right. Yeah, yeah.
It's good just, sort of, halfway round.
I'll stop... I'll stop you when I want to see the position I want.
I think Kenneth was ahead
of his time.
He was probably the first
choreographer who stretched
the physicality of...
..um...of the body, of the dancers.
I'm sorry. Put that leg on the floor, Alex.
I want you to be like that, that way.
Sorry. I'm going to have to put my leg on the floor.
You know, before that, ballet was very classical.
It had structure and
a whole vocabulary, and he broke those rules.
Leg more there.
I always felt that I had to...
..push myself beyond my own...
..fears
to be up to what he needed, and what he wanted from me.
I use very complicated holds, and very high lifts,
and you need to be very strong to do that.
That's it, yeah. You're still having trouble with that?
Yeah.
It's the hip bone that goes in here.
So it sticks in my ribs.
His pas de deux at the time were really considered super dangerous.
It was almost shocking, what he was asking us to do.
I think one of the biggest shocks
was I didn't realise
that intensity of working day in, day out with Kenneth.
Nothing was ever good enough.
I was in a touring company, and he came in to watch class,
and then suddenly I get called into the office.
Good and bad news - "You're leaving the company,
"but you're going to work with Kenneth."
I was 19 when that happened to me.
It's not anything you'd ever rethink. You go, "Yes, yes, yes."
All I wanted to do was impress.
Now, that jete should be together.
Both of you.
He would build a pas de deux.
To go...
..this way.
He'd work on it for about three days, four days.
On the fifth day, he'd go,
"Wipe it. We're going to start again."
And you'd be like, "Whoa, all that work!
"I thought this was really cool.
"This was an amazing lift."
"No, no. Wipe it. We're going to start afresh again."
He just wanted to see you adapt and play -
"No, no. I like that, but actually now turn it.
"And then lift your leg, and then go the other way."
So it was just watching you evolve.
And that, as a dancer, is incredibly satisfying,
because you did feel part of it. You weren't just given steps.
I was a very good dancer.
I was a classical dancer.
But I wasn't very happy.
I hated the drudgery of having to go to class every single day
to keep in shape to be a dancer.
I got very bored with that side of it.
The sort of things I was given to dance
I also thought were very boring,
where you'd just come on and do pyrotechnics.
I wanted to do something creative.
I wanted to do more.
I stopped dancing when I was about 23, I think,
mainly because I had the most terrible attack of stage fright,
and I just hated performing.
And I, sort of, turned to choreography as a release
from dancing.
And I was lucky enough that the first thing I did, everybody liked.
He was a sensitive mess, a wonderful, sensitive mess,
which I adored, actually.
His very first professional ballet was Danses Concertantes.
Danses Concertantes was a Stravinsky ballet. I mean,
I was 17 or something, and at this school,
you do everything to classical music,
and suddenly you're thrown into a Stravinsky score,
and you think, "Oh, hell."
I tried to match the spikiness
of the Stravinsky music, and the, sort of,
offbeat quality and jazzy quality with the music,
and I've seen it recently, actually, and I think that still stands out.
It's a plotless ballet, but I broke a lot of the rules
of straightforward classical dancing.
I mean, when you look at ballet in the classroom... I mean,
what the teacher wants is harmonious line to music.
And I'd made it not harmonious.
I made it very like the music, which isn't.
It's very spiky and broken up.
And I broke up all the lines of the body, really,
which makes it very different.
I mean, I was just very excited that
that was the first ballet that I was in that had been created on me.
It was very clever, I thought,
and inventive.
Kenneth was always choreographically wise, I thought, hugely inventive.
Every choreographer is different.
There are ones who can read music.
I don't, and I don't want to,
because I want the emotion of the music to move me.
I don't want to know the mathematics of how it's made.
You get these hard points with the pas de deux.
Musically, you're taken to something where you think,
"This is the peak," and then it takes off again.
So as part of the audience, you're just taken to this almost
unbearable pitch where it's then resolved.
That's brilliant, brilliant dance making, I think.
I think all the big roles I've created for a female dancer
have been dramatic roles.
Really tragic heroines.
I want the audience to believe completely in everything they do.
Once, he turned to me and said, "Don't ever be afraid
"of being ugly onstage."
And I thought about it, and I thought, "What did he mean?"
And I realised that what he meant is don't be a ballerina.
Be a woman.
When life gets terrible and tragic...
..the ugliness becomes the beauty of life sometimes.
The experience itself.
You went off for three years
as director of the German Opera ballet in West Berlin -
was that a productive time?
Well, I don't know about productive.
I learned a great deal. I mean,
I was becoming a director of a big ballet company for the first time.
Did you speak German? No. This was one of the drawbacks,
I'm afraid, and very few people spoke English, so I was terribly,
terribly lonely.
And it was very difficult to be real friends with the dancers if you then
have to become an authoritative figure,
so I know what it's like to be lonely.
When I joined the Royal Ballet,
I think Sir Fred was very much considered,
in a way, establishment.
He'd been there from the early beginnings of the company.
Sir Fred very much loved the glamour and the romance of the subjects.
And Kenneth was pushing the boundaries.
My relationship with Ashton was a strange relationship.
When I was a dancer...
..we got on very well together.
And, actually, it was in his rehearsals that really
I thought that I could become a choreographer.
When I became more successful,
I think the relationship became a bit strained.
And finally I got this offer to go to Berlin, and I went to him,
and I said, "I've been asked to
"go and be director of Berlin. What do you think?"
Hoping he would say, "Don't go."
But he didn't. He said "Go," so I did.
The wall was very much in evidence then. It was very restrictive.
I didn't like it at all.
I started drinking a lot.
He found being on his own very difficult, for whatever reason.
Perhaps it was depression,
perhaps it was remembering things about his past. I don't know.
But he used to tell me that he would drink a bottle of whisky a day.
And at around 33, he went to have a bath one evening,
and couldn't get out of the bath for six hours,
and it transpired he'd had a stroke.
And he was told, in Germany, "If you don't stop drinking immediately,
"you're going to die."
So I had no alternative.
I didn't want to die.
When MacMillan was in Berlin, he decided to do Anastasia,
about this woman who'd been discovered, derelict,
in Berlin in the 1920s.
She claimed that she was actually the grand Duchess Anastasia,
daughter of the last tsar,
who had escaped the horrendous
massacre when the Bolshevik troops had shot
the Romanov family.
SHOTS RING OUT
SHE SCREAMS
It was a story so idiotic, but MacMillan,
I suppose, thought, "Well, what if she was?"
The situation I enjoyed working at best
is the individual against society, really.
The outsider figure that has a hard time.
It was the first time that I'd received such unanimous hostility.
I think, really, the only two critics that liked -
the man who wrote for the Financial Times.
I think every other paper in England hated the ballet.
I can't think why, except it was very un-Ashtonian.
I had a real breakdown over that.
I lost confidence completely.
I didn't really work for about three months.
So you filmed all of these, didn't you?
I think I must have, yes.
I don't know what I was doing.
You were trying on ballet shoes!
The dancers had given you a pair of pointe shoes,
and you were determined to go en pointe.
I think Kenneth was there to partner you.
Look, you see, you're doing a little bit of choreography there.
I like that back leg.
The first time I felt I'd found part of my identity was
when I did my very first ballet.
The second part of my identity happened when I met Deborah
and had Charlotte.
It gave me a tremendous sense of security, and she made me see that,
really, the press didn't really matter at all.
He was very affectionate, Dad, wasn't he?
He was. He adored you.
I had a friend who said, would I like to come to the movies
with him, and I said I would,
and on the same night,
he'd invited Kenneth, and I didn't know who Kenneth was from Adam.
I hadn't a clue. And the film that was showing was Play Misty For Me,
which was probably one of the most horrific films I've ever...
I'm not good with horror!
And this other person kept getting up and leaving the theatre.
And I thought, "He's as terrified as I am."
I found out later...
..that he'd had this massive, terrible, terrible breakdown.
And the first thing the psychiatrist asked him was,
"When did you last have any sex?"
And he said, "I can't remember."
And the psychiatrist said, "What do you prefer, men or women?"
And he said, "I think women."
And the psychiatrist said, "Right,
"I'm going to fix you up with a call girl."
And it was that night that we met.
I think he must have been so terrified...
..that this was going to happen, that here was this girl,
and then he embarked on a very old-fashioned, very sweet, very,
very touching courtship, and I fell for him big time.
He was lovely.
# Look at me
# I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree
# And I feel like I'm clinging
# To a cloud I can't understand
# I get misty just holding your hand... #
It was an intense relationship,
and she strongly believed that my father
was quite an extraordinary person
and needed support,
and she was there for him.
And I think, for him, she was unlike anyone he'd never met before.
It captures a moment in time when he was very happy.
But I was always aware growing up
that there had been this period of time
in his life, previous to him marrying my mum,
of him being incredibly unhappy.
Those were the days where medication for anxiety and depression...
..barbiturates were involved, tranquillisers were involved,
being knocked out was involved.
Throughout the latter stages of his life,
until probably the last five years of his life,
he pretty much took tranquillisers every day, or barbiturates, and, er,
that contributed heavily towards his weakened heart.
There were dark clouds some days.
He did use, you know,
the mask of the dark sunglasses sometimes,
which is always a bit unnerving, especially as a dancer,
because you don't know who he's looking at.
One just knew that... Well, you know,
as with life, people are different,
and sometimes you can gauge that maybe it's not such a good day.
But I think that the work was his medicine.
He had to work.
If you're a creator, you can't...
If you're a chicken, you can't stop laying eggs.
And if you're a creator, you can't stop producing work.
It's almost a psychic evacuation.
You get rid of some anxiety, some problem, whatever it may be,
by bringing it out into the world.
He was, after all, an absolutely splendid craftsman.
and he bloody well showed that it could.
One, two, three, four...
HUMMING
It's very often that things that have happened or I've seen
in my life I've used in the ballet.
For instance, Gloria.
And when I came to do the ballet,
it was prompted by thinking about my father,
who was a soldier in the First World War and was gassed.
I mean, he didn't die, but he suffered from that all his life.
My father's relationship with his father was very tricky.
Not much was said between them.
I would imagine he was probably suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder.
I think his closest relationships in his family were with his mother and
one of his sisters, who was called Jean, and she was deaf.
By all accounts, my father was the only person in the family who could
properly communicate with her, even though he didn't use sign language.
The females in his life were very important relationships.
The sister he was close to died in a horrific car crash.
His mother died when he was 12, I think.
He left at 15.
He'd gone already,
and never really wanted to go back.
He never really wanted to go back.
For him, the...
The cruelty of life was very present in his being.
The theme of the work...
..that moment in our lives when we start to think about our mortality.
It's serious stuff.
I think you need to be
more experienced as a human being in order to understand Song.
Song Of The Earth was the first time, I think,
I understood his genius.
How he was able to create
such a dark feeling within a work,
and, as a dancer, to get totally sucked into it.
It had this sense of death and life and hanging onto life.
It was the first time I actually felt like a real artist,
and I thank him for that.
When I came to teach Darcey the role,
she could feel what I felt.
I think the final part, when you're required to run en pointe,
we call it boureeing, running en pointe,
from one side of the stage to the other and back,
and you run forwards and you run backwards,
and running backwards at as high a speed as you can control
is not easy, but it's...
It's genius.
The message came from the director of the opera house
that they thought Song Of The Earth was not suitable to be made into
a ballet, and they were not going to allow me to do it.
I rang John Cranko in Stuttgart and said,
"Look, I have this idea for Song Of The Earth.
"I'm not allowed to do it at Covent Garden.
"I'd like to do it for your company."
He said, "Well, come straight away."
It was a huge success, and within three months,
it was performed at the opera house,
which was sort of ironic, really.
I mean, I crowed inside.
Song Of The Earth, for me, is a masterpiece.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I would say that it's impossible
to imagine the Royal Ballet without the MacMillan repertoire.
We would be, and dance worldwide -
classical companies particularly would be -
a very much poorer place without Kenneth.
I meet, time and time again, dancers who come over to the Royal Ballet,
they join the company because they specifically
want to dance in MacMillan ballets, and that's a great thing to hear.
But, you know, with a lot of his ballets,
time is the greatest testament,
and things like Manon, which at the time was panned by the critics,
is now one of the most popular ballets
that's performed by companies around the world.
Anastasia's made a revival, and people loved it.
We had Russians coming, flying over from Russia to watch it.
So I'm hoping that that will happen to a lot of his ballets
that initially weren't met with much success.
There is a class system here, an old boy network, erm,
which I never belonged to, and I've always kicked against,
and always will.
I think there's a fault in that, from my point of view.
You know, I could have had an easier time had I embraced all that
and pursued all the establishment things,
but I haven't and I never will.
He had real reason for being prickly.
He had real reason for being bolshie right through his career.
Now, he's dead, of course, he's a genius,
which I have to say sticks in my craw a bit.
However, I swallow it up.
But, you know, it's easy when someone's dead,
cos then they're never going to do anything ever again to shock the...
..frighten the horses, which he did all the time, thank God,
cos I think he was a genius, I really do.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, and go - zoom!
Nine, ten. Good.
And one, two...
Despite his rather soft exterior and his very gentle voice,
I always recognised that there was real steel
under Kenneth...Kenneth's exterior,
and I think that steeliness was a kind of ruthlessness about work.
Great position.
In, out...
The Judas Tree is a dark story.
It's about betrayal.
He was a risk taker.
He didn't think of the consequences that might occur,
you know, by telling a story or by talking about something.
You know, I think most people would have expected him towards the end of
his life to have done a nice fairy ballet,
but this was about gang rape.
He was always very dark,
but he did extraordinary things with it.
So much of The Judas Tree is about young men growing up
and the issues they have to deal with...
..the violence that's inherent in certain kinds of society,
the disregard of normal, civilised behaviour,
and yet in parallel there's the subtext of this sort of
mythological creature, this woman who's the eternal mother,
the eternal prostitute,
the eternal saint,
and the eternal undying figure.
There's this, kind of, juxtaposition of these two things going on.
He's been accused of misogyny in that ballet,
but if you look at it objectively,
the only person left alive on the stage at the end
is the female figure,
sorrowing, weeping for them.
The stupidity of men...
Not stupidity, folly.
"My dear Brian, I wanted your music to push me.
"It was a scary business.
"The ballet was not easy to do, but I am glad that we risked it.
"Much love, Kenneth."
I didn't know that it was suddenly going to be
builders on a building site and a rather violent gang rape at the end,
and I had no idea of that,
but, I mean, I trusted him, and we wanted Kenneth to create a new work.
He was a mysterious person,
and, I mean, a lot of choreographers are.
You think they're so pent up during the creative process,
because they're so exposed too.
What they give on stage is just them.
They are responsible for the whole shebang.
They're a very rare and odd breed, choreographers.
My father was always a mad collector of things.
It was a private passion.
# My ship's aglow with a million pearls
# And rubies fill each bin
# The sun sits high in a sapphire sky
# When my ship comes in... #
The first time I really understood about his obsessive collecting of
costume jewellery was when I was about 14, and I went with him to
an antiques market in Chelsea.
We walked in and I heard someone whispering loudly to somebody else,
"Quick! He's in - get all your best pieces out."
He'd collected hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces,
and he became quite an expert.
He was always, always surprising.
He could tap into a passion that was nothing to do with ballet,
and also was quite secretive.
He was a secretive person,
so he would go out and buy these pieces,
and wrap them up in plastic and bring them home,
and often not tell my mother that he'd bought a piece,
and then put them straight away in a box,
and never look at them again.
When he died and was taken to hospital,
along with, you know, his watch and wallet and things,
in the wallet was £560,
and somebody said to me, "Do you think he was going to do a runner?"
And I said, "No, I don't think so,"
but I think he was probably planning to go on up to Camden Town,
and buy yet another piece of jewellery.
That's why he'd squirrel them away, because I'd say,
"Why are you buying more?"
And he'd say, "I can never buy enough."
Kenneth had a massive heart attack in Brisbane in 1988.
My father was a retired GP, and got all the information and said,
"Look, he's...he's in a bad way,
"and you're going to have to, you know, come to terms with this,
"and it's very serious and there's nothing they can do."
A very good doctor in London kept him going.
I sometimes remember he was taking pills during rehearsal.
I remember him...doing this gesture a lot.
Erm...
I'm not sure what was wrong with him.
His frustration was actually,
"I feel really weak. I feel really tired."
And it was, you know, a bit like Song Of The Earth,
you know, trying to hang on.
You know, "Can I stay alive much longer?
Cos I think the thing that kept him alive was creating, you know?
If he wasn't creating, life was rubbish.
As much as he loved having a home life and a wife and child,
for him, it was...
The work was the most important thing.
He had put so much into remounting Mayerling...
..and after act one of Mayerling,
he said, "I'm not feeling very well.
"I think I'm going to stay backstage for act two,
"and I'll see you in the canteen,
"and you can tell me how act two has gone."
I came back and I couldn't find him.
Anthony and Deborah and I looked everywhere for him,
and we couldn't find him anywhere.
I think it was one of the firemen.
I went to the stage door and one of the firemen had said,
"Look, we've found someone. Can you come?"
And it was in a very odd part of the opera house.
And the fireman took me there, and there he was, lying there,
and then Lady MacMillan was brought to the scene,
and it was all just terrible.
It was just heartbreaking, really heartbreaking.
I mean, it's left forever, isn't it?
In spite of all the difficulties and in spite of all the depression,
which was severe,
the anxiety and depression which literally dogged his life,
he came through it and he came through it brilliantly,
and I admire that more than I can say, actually.
I find it touching, I find it inspiring,
I find it moving, erm,
and I miss him.
Let's have another record.
The next record is Sarah Vaughan singing Misty.
on the island of my wife.
We met during this terribly violent film where this song was played,
so this record will remind me of that moment.
MUSIC: Misty by Sarah Vaughan
# Look at me
# I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree
# And I feel like I'm clinging to a cloud
# I can't understand
# I get misty just holding your hand... #