‘More natural than nature, more artificial than art’: An Interview with David Bintley

Abstract

David Fuller: We are going to range widely, keeping in view the fundamental subject, the recovery of beauty. I want to begin by asking about what might seem a problem of almost too much beauty — the popular image of ballet, which is perhaps still based on the Petipa and Ivanov choreographies for Tchaikovsky’s three famous ballet scores, Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892). That popular view ignores what has been happening in ballet over the past hundred years, from the revolutions of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes and the exciting tearing-up-the-seats events that produced. It ignores major innovative writing for the music of ballet, beginning with the work of Stravinsky; innovative design for ballet, beginning with Picasso; and the work of a number of prominent women in the field: especially, in Britain, Ninette de Valois, who founded the Royal Ballet, and with whom David Bintley worked and to whom he was close, and Marie Rambert, who founded what is now known as the Rambert Dance Company. Last, and most important to the development of ballet in the twentieth century, it ignores choreographers who have worked in inventing new modes of dance — including George Balanchine in America, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor and Kenneth MacMillan in Britain, and, over the last 30 years, many others.