Article by:
Sharon Verghis
David Bintley is the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s veteran artistic director, a sparkling former character dancer nurtured early by some of English ballet’s greatest names — think Fred Ashton, Peter Wright and Ninette de Valois — and choreographer of ballets based on everything from Shakespeare and fairy tales to physics, Kafka stories and Egyptian embalming ceremonies.
He is also a soccer tragic and loyal supporter of the hapless English soccer team Aston Villa.
“Oh Gawd, it’s been miserable this year,” he groans in despair in a phone call to Review from the West Midlands city, where he has led the Birmingham Royal Ballet for more than 20 years. “But that’s sport, innit? You can’t appreciate the highs without the lows.”
His team’s grim match record aside, Bintley was keen to draw on the teamwork, grace and spirit of soccer, among other things, for his second collaboration with Australian composer Matthew Hindson, Faster. Created in 2012, it will feature as part of a triple bill by the Australian Ballet this month.
In a homage to everything from combat sports and fencing to wrestling and synchronised swimming, it is built around high emotion — the joy and agony of competition — and set against Hindson’s equally dramatic commissioned score.
Bintley says his first work with Hindson, e=mc2 in 2009, was such an enjoyable experience it was inevitable they would join forces again. The looming London Olympics sparked the idea of a ballet dedicated to the elegant athleticism and grace of athletes, revolving around the Olympic motto of “faster, higher, stronger’’.
They wanted to name the work after the slogan but “we came in conflict with the IOC [International Olympic Committee],” he says ruefully. “And hence the title of the work is Faster.’’ He says it with good-humoured resignation but at the time Bintley was scathing about the IOC’s “absurd and “quite nonsensical” approach: “You’re lumped in alongside gift shops and people who want to trade off the movement, who set out to make economic gains from everything they make … yet this is a serious work of art, inspired by Olympic ideals.”
Dictatorial international sporting tsars aside, he and Hindson had a blast working together. The creative process began on opposite sides of the world, with Hindson sending Bintley sound files spiked with everything from heavy metal to ceremonial medieval touches.
“I love Matthew’s music and at one point I said to him, ‘Anything you write, I can choreograph.’ So I pretty much left him up to his own devices. We would go through [what he sent me] and I sort of edited it along the way. I think it was quite a novel thing for Matthew because composers often work in isolation. The fact that I could say — ‘maybe this is a bit too long, maybe this isn’t the first movement, maybe it’s the last’— I think he appreciated that.”
Choreographically, Bintley was adamant there would be nothing literal — dancers emulating tennis swings, for example: “I didn’t want to play ‘guess the sport’, you know ... it was more about the Olympic ideal of striving for higher achievement.
It was also a kinetic byproduct of sport because often we talk about sportsmen as beautiful in their movement, the way they hit or strike a ball, the way a particular runner has a style of movement.”
Sport has inspired a string of ballet choreographers, from Nijinsky with Jeux to Robert Helpmann with The Display. In Faster, Bintley structured dancers in groups ranging from aerials (“I was thinking about everything that passes through the air, so every sort of jumping discipline, diving”) to throwing (“that covers everything from javelins and shot put and so on”), to a category of team sports including soccer, based on the elegant mechanics and ballet of cooperation “when a team works together, but also the team spirit you get in almost everything from football to relay teams ... so that was the kind of raw material I was giving Matthew”.
Interestingly, in his second year as artistic director at Birmingham, Bintley gave an interview where he savaged the trend towards “extreme” physicality and ugly contortions in dance at the expense of nuance and artistry.
Fast forward to Faster, and here is a work that is a homage to physicality. “Look, I never ceased to embrace the new and the modern,” Bintley says. “These are the times we live in. But I still think the extreme movement for the purpose of the extreme movement is sterile — it doesn’t interest me. If it has no spiritual context, if it’s not about anything, if it’s not relating a particular creator’s view of the world to me and changing my view ... then to me it is just dull.”
Bintley was born in September 1957 in Honley near Huddersfield, England, to parents who were both music teachers, seeding in their son a lifelong love of music. At 16 he won a place at the Royal Ballet Upper School, with a contract at Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, as it was then known, following in 1976.
He has memories of dancing barefoot at 17 in class under the eagle eye of the formidable “Madame” — the legendary ballet star and company founder de Valois, who took a liking to him. He would go on to show a flair for character roles such as the Ugly Sister in Cinderella, Alain and Widow Simone in La Fille mal gardee, Bottom in The Dream and the lead in Petrushka, but early on, a love of choreography took root. His first work was made for his local school.
“It was a version of The Soldier’s Tale by Stravinsky and I made it because I wanted to star in it — I wanted to be the soldier.” He laughs. “But the turning point was that I found out I was actually more interested in making the piece than in being the star of the show.”
At SWRB, director Wright spotted his talent and gave him his first commission — a ballet that dealt with prostitution and murder (“it was X-rated and had a really stupid story,” he would later say, “but the steps were actually pretty good”). Ashton would also nurture his early talent, singling him out as a future dance-making star.
In 1983, he became a resident choreographer at the company, and from 1986 to 1993 he held the same post with the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden. From the start, he was a choreographer in the English classical ballet tradition of Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and de Valois, but throughout his career he would cross genres, moving from classical work to abstract pieces to fairytales and back again. Key works include Hobson’s Choice, Cyrano, Sylvia, Edward II, Carmina Burana, Cinderella, Far From the Madding Crowd and The King Dances; last year came his extravagant take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest set to designs by War Horse’s Rae Smith and a new score by British composer Sally Beamish.
As with Hindson and their two collaborations, he loved the process of making new work and exploring new music. “Most of the work I do now is original scores because it’s just more interesting. Working with a composer is a much bigger thrill than hearing music on the radio.”
In 1995, he took over as director of Birmingham Royal Ballet. He is palpably proud of the company’s distinctive identity and history. It has a complex backstory, complete with multiple name changes, beginning in 1931 when de Valois founded a company at Sadler’s Wells Theatre known as the Vic-Wells Ballet, the early version of the Royal Ballet.
In the 1940s, following the bombing of the theatre during the war, the company began to tour the country, changing its name to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. “And that was really when a great love of ballet was created in the country,” he says. In 1946 it became the resident company of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and would be renamed the Royal Ballet.
De Valois then founded a second company called Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, which would go on to become the touring company of the Royal Ballet. In 1977, it was renamed Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, with Wright as director, and in 1990 it moved to a new home in Birmingham and changed its name to Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Bintley came in with a mission to protect its heritage roots. “We like to think of ourselves more like the original ballet than the Royal Ballet. We have a mission to the country — we think of ourselves very much as the national ballet company, even if we’re not known as the first company. We see ourselves very much as equal to the [Royal Ballet].” He chuckles. “I don’t want to say more important.”
He sees Birmingham, however, as “absolutely” the guardian of the English classical ballet tradition. “We represent the Royal Ballet from the 1930s onwards. So we’re still doing works by Cranko and MacMillan and Ashton and de Valois, of course — we are very conscious of our history (the company is also the custodian of Wright’s iconic classics, including Nutcracker, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty).”
“We generally have three parts to what we do, and it represents the past, present and future. It reflects something Madame de Valois said years ago — one foot in the future and one foot in the past but always in the present ... and so it’s a permanent balancing of that approach.
“What makes us distinctive? Among other things, it’s the fact that we are not in London. In Birmingham, we sit at the heart of the country, and from there we can reach all parts of the country. We are a touring company and that is fundamental to our identity. We’re also known as a company that gives youth a chance ... we throw people on quickly if they can do it.”
It’s one of the most powerful weapons Bintley wields when it comes to snaring top talent graduating from the Royal Ballet School. He has to negotiate with the Royal Ballet when the picks come on to the market each year “and so Kevin O’Hare [the RB’s director] and I have a conversation about who interests us, and we might have a tussle over someone”. He laughs. “It comes down to a bit of bargaining.”
Bintley remains passionate about advocating for the classical tradition and is pleased to see narrative ballet make a return in the works of Liam Scarlett and Christopher Wheeldon and in recent pieces such as Akram Khan’s Giselle for English National Ballet and David Dawson’s Swan Lake for Scottish Ballet.
“John Neumeier, alongside myself, despite fashion being against us, we have continued to make that kind of work because it’s important — storytelling is the basis of humanity, we tell a story every time we wake up and go through another day, it’s what defines us and what we are about.
“This view that storytelling is irrelevant in dance is utter nonsense — the wheel has turned again and people are attracted by stories, they are selling tickets.”
“It shows again why the classics are so important ... it’s not for nothing that these roles, like Odette-Odile, are still the Hamlets of our art form.” But he cautions that companies can’t just “throw on” a classic without an entrenched and rigorous classical training culture behind it. “It is very important for the future of dance that we are trained and experts in the past because the strength of any ballet company is its heritage and the classics.”
At the same time, he warns against companies lazily relying on a roster of money-spinning classics at the expense of investing in new work that advances the art form. As he has said, “I worry — where is the next Edward II coming from? Or the next Mayerling? Or are we doomed for the next however long that if it isn’t a fairy story or a new Swan Lake or a revisionist Sleeping Beauty, then we just can’t sell it?”
But he remains optimistic about ballet’s future: he has no time for those who decry it as a spent art form, trapped in the past. A snort travels down the line. “Frederick Ashton said to me once, ballet is the great absorber ... all the way through history, we have taken every movement trend and it’s been absorbed into the classical language.
“And that is its great strength and power. That’s why it transcends all of theatrical dance. Over 400 years later, we are still here.
“The only thing we have to fear is not the work itself but the money and the branding and all those boring, dull things around it — how do we sell it? We might be a business which is struggling alongside all those other diversions that the world has introduced but we are not failing — far from it. Ballet is stronger than it ever was.”
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