© John Slater Ballet into the 21st Century Conference Ballet.co magazine coverage Ballet into the 21st Century forum... to link with the second Ballet Artistic Directors conference. Go and have your say in where ballet should heading. Introduction to Snape Conference Brendan McCarthy's earlier interview Kevin Ng's Bintley Inetrview recent BRB reviews

David Bintley is not a doubter. He stands firmly in the apostolic succession of British ballet, having been anointed early in his life by Ninette de Valois. He learnt his craft at Covent Garden while Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan were at the peak of their powers. Now artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB), he is a confident apologist for classical values and for the English tradition.

If ballet has its Eurosceptics, David Bintley probably counts as one. Unlike many companies today, BRB has no works in its repertory from Kylian, Duato, Forsythe and Ek. “One of the reasons that I don’t get their work is that everybody else does it”, Bintley explains. Instead he has invited choreographers such as James Kudelka, Lila York and Stanton Welch (“the next wave”), to work with his company. Bintley thinks it important to foster work within BRB and by English choreographers. “We have a very different style to the Europeans. Their work does not have the foothold here that it

“I don’t like the globalisation of dance” David Bintley

does in Europe. I am not just talking about the major European choreographers, but also about that massive number of people underneath them, that are copying and being influenced by them. I don’t like the globalisation of dance.”

He senses he has more in common with American artistic directors than with his counterparts in Europe, where even the word ‘ballet’ is understood differently. Ensembles performing contemporary work have relatively straightforward structures, while classical companies are burdened by the demands of traditional ballet hierarchy. “A lot of my headaches come from that, whereas in a smaller company, where the repertory was more ‘egalitarian’, experience was more important.”

Balancing heritage ballets with new work

Ask David Bintley if he agrees that ballet is ‘stuck’ and you will get a sharp answer. “I don’t buy that” He does not accept that the repertory base is small, and recalls the difficulties faced by BRB and the Royal Ballet in balancing the demands of heritage against those for newer work. “Look at what happened with Ross Stretton when he tried to expand the repertory base at the Royal Ballet and they were not doing as much Ashton and MacMillan as his critics wanted. It’s a fine balancing act.”

Bintley has not, in his terms, been very prolific in the past two years. Neither has he been able to afford as many outside choreographers as he would have wished. While the Hippodrome in Birmingham was closed, BRB needed to tour and the company accumulated a large deficit. “I’m in a really tricky position. We have all these ideas. We have all this creativity. But we’re not in a position at the moment to be able to utilise it.” Despite this, he is planning for the future. BRB has a fledging choreographic group: in eighteen months he hopes to give its more promising members opportunities to move beyond the workshop stage, and to mount work with proper production budgets.

Training Artistic Directors

Among the issues to be discussed at the Snape rural retreat is the training of artistic directors. Bintley felt it a major advantage to have been a choreographer before he became a director himself. “That gives you a lot of the personnel skills that you need.” He was, he said, fortunate to have been “shaped by great people”. Shadowing another director might not be the answer. “I saw Anthony Dowell do that with Norman Morrice for a period of time. It was uncomfortable. Anthony trailed around after Norman and hovered in the background. The best way to learn is just to get in there. It is not a job you can learn. Looking back at the problems I have had along the way, I don’t think anybody could have told me anything that would have helped.”

David Bintley rejects the argument that combining the roles of artistic director and company choreographer is an impossible balancing act: “I joined the company because it was going to give me the creative freedom I hadn’t had under my previous director. I experienced what I considered to be bad planning of my works alongside other people. Once I came here, I could now plan what I wanted.” There were additional problems at a large company such as the Royal Ballet;

“I joined the company because it was going to give me the creative freedom I hadn’t had under my previous director. I experienced what I considered to be bad planning of my works alongside other people. Once I came here, I could now plan what I wanted” David Bintley

a problem of authority within the repertory, the relative importance of the company choreographer’s work, and the dancers he was able to work with. “I was in a company where I felt at the time that the dancers were not being brought along properly: that the emphasis on what was important about being a dancer was not one I agreed with. That directly affected my work as a choreographer. Now because I am the director as well, I can apply a complete philosophy about what a dancer is, how a dancer should be trained, and how a dancer should be treated, pastorally and professionally. The whole thing is geared towards producing a healthy creative confident individual, with whom I can make work.” Birmingham Royal Ballet’s new school, in collaboration with Elmhurst was, he said, part of a ‘grand experiment’, a radical rethinking of dancer education, teaching young people to think about what they were doing, than merely doing as they were bidden.

Dancer education can be patchy: companies sometimes seem to focus more on explaining a work and its context to the audience than to the dancers. David Bintley accepts a certain truth in this. He frequently speaks to the Friends of Birmingham Royal Ballet at workshops and lecture/demonstrations. “It suddenly occurred to me that these people often knew me a lot better than did members of the company.”

Classical and contemporary dance: the limits to dialogue

On the issue of division in dance, (“the million dollar question”), Bintley believes that the contemporary and classical traditions need to be in dialogue and to learn from each other. Ballet companies with pretensions to

“This company is never going to stop doing Swan Lake... You can’t throw out our classical heritage” David Bintley

creativity, he says, must employ dancers with a much greater stylistic range. There should be more crossover, but ballet should be confident of itself: “we are a repertory company with a mixture of work which I think is as new, and as vital, as any contemporary dance company is making, and as valid and as challenging.”

There would always be limits. Ballet companies such as BRB and the Royal Ballet were no more likely to stop performing Swan Lake than an opera company would stop performing works by Mozart. “You can’t throw out our classical heritage”. This heritage is bound up with the existence of large ballet companies, in much the way that the West’s art music heritage is bound up with the existence of the symphony orchestra. “You cannot keep a company of sixty dancers

“Contemporary choreographers such as William Forsythe and Nacho Duato are not really making works that can keep a company like mine going” David Bintley

together to do the kind of work that is being created nowadays. Contemporary choreographers such as William Forsythe and Nacho Duato are not really making works that can keep a company like mine going.” To make good the gap, Bintley resorts to the Balanchine repertory and also makes occasional works of his own such as this season’s Concert Fantasy.

David Bintley is a passionate man and an unashamed classicist. This is the tradition he values, loves and champions. He will be one of its most confident advocates when he meets his colleagues at Snape.