The influence of the 'Swinging Sixties' was more evident in off-duty photographs, and incidents like the famous Fonteyn/Nureyev drugs bust, than on-stage.
At Covent Garden, Frederick Ashton was the Director of the Royal Ballet, while Kenneth macmillan was in Berlin, running the ballet company at the German Opera.
Event of the year
Was the first performance, in October, of the Contemporary Dance Group under its director Robert Cohan - a tiny company of dancers which grew into LCDT, the leading modern dance company in Britain until its recent sad demise.
Company of the Year
Was Ballet Rambert, in its first full year since the dramatic change of course when it abandoned the classics and its traditional repertoire to concentrate on the work of contemporary choreographers. During the year there were 15 new productions - possibly a creative record for a British company?
Calendar
| January |
Christopher Gable gave his last performance with the Royal Ballet
Antony Tudor's 'Shadowplay' was premièred at Covent Garden, with the 23 year old Anthony Dowell in the leading role. It featured Derek Rencher and Anthony Dowell in a "superb and strange duet"; the best part according to Buckle. It was the first ballet Tudor had created in the UK since 1938.
Rambert gave the first performance by a British company of a work by Glen Tetley - 'Pierrot Lunaire'. Two more Tetley revivals and a new piece followed it into the repertory during the year.
John B Read lights his first ballet (as it happens for Rambert).
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February |
A new Ashton ballet, 'Sinfonietta', was created for the touring Royal Ballet at Stratford-on-Avon. Doreen Wells and David Wall had the leading roles.
Fonteyn and Nureyev starred in a new piece, 'Paradise Lost', at Covent Garden. An 'Adam and Eve' ballet by Roland Petit, it gave both dancers new and challenging things to do. |
March |
Twyla Tharp brought her company (herself and two others!) to London for the first time. She was already known and admired as a dancer in Paul Taylor's company, but her choreography had a very mixed reception - the Dancing Times hated it but Dance and Dancers thought she might go far. |
April |
The Martha Graham company was in London for a 3 week season. The company had become steadily more popular here since playin to practically empty houses on its first visit in 1954. Graham herself, at 72, still appeared in several of her original roles. It prompted the critic Richard Buckle to recall an Oscar Wilde quote: "The tragedy of old age is, not that one is old, but that one is young."
The Royal Ballet opened a New York season with 'Cinderella' and a near disaster: the coach taking Svetlana Beriosova to the ball overturned, throwing her out on to the stage - fortunately she wasn't seriously injured and was able to continue after a 45 minute interval.
Kurt Joos's famous work 'The Green Table' was shown on British television, with a cast including Pina Bausch.
'Jewels' - a Balanchine masterpiece made up of three linked, but plotless, works, had its première in New York. |
May |
Netherlands Dance Theatre made its first visit to London, having already been seen on previous trips in the less expected surroundings of Sunderland and Southend. |
June |
Western Theatre Ballet, a small company founded in Bristol by Elizabeth West and Peter Darrell, gave a Sadler's Wells season to celebrate having survived 10 years of hard graft. (Two years later they moved to Edinburgh and eventually metamorphosed into Scottish Ballet.)
Clive Barnes, in Leningrad for the White Nights Festival, had his first glimpse of 'probably the most perfect dancer I have ever seen': a 19 year old boy called Mikhail Baryshnikov.
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July |
Fonteyn and Nureyev were arrested in Haights Ashbury in San Francisco when a party they'd been invited to was raaided by anti-drugs police. Both were released after several hours at a police station, well-recorded by press photographers.
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August |
London Festival Ballet (now ENB) danced their first ever performance of 'Sleeping Beauty'. It was produced by Ben Stevenson, and Noella Pontois (from Paris) and John Gilpin danced the leads.
An event casting a long shadow into the future: NYCB, appearing at the Edinburgh Festival and needing at short notice a replacement to dance the lead in 'Apollo', flew in 20 year old Peter Martins from the Royal Danish Ballet. Balanchine could only bring some 25 dancers with him and was unable to rehearse one of his programmes because the theatre had Bingo in the afternoon! |
October |
The Contemporary Dance Group gave its first performance at the Adeline Genée Theatre in East Grinstead. Guests from the Martha Graham company danced alongside graduates of the London Contemporary Dance school, founded by Robin Howard ony two years earlier.
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December |
The Royal Ballet postponed its new version of 'Nutcracker' (by Nureyev): the costumes couldn't be ready in time as the ROH was concentrating its efforts on a revival of 'Aida'. It was some compensation that they were giving a series of triple bills of a quality we can only dream about these days: imagine 'Ballet Imperial', 'Monotones' and 'Les Noces'! |
