When watching Bintley rehearsing in the studio (see p.12), I was able to observe on the one hand how much he seeks inspiration from the dancers themselves, and on the other that he produces choreography tailor made for them. Unlike Ashton and MacMillan, who were inspired by particular dancers or muses such as Margot Fonteyn and Lynn Seymour, Bintley is more democratic in the way that he is interested in all his dancers. This may be because he has most often personally selected them for the company. He often experiments with a step or sequence, abandons it and then returns to it another day. He also admits to having days when he does not produce or create anything that he wants to include in a ballet (interview 2004a). Since he knows the dancers well, he is able to give them directions in his own form of “shorthand” (ibid) and they respond with the
quality of movement Bintley is seeking to achieve. Since taking up the position of Artistic Director of the BRB in 1995, Bintley has rarely choreographed for other dance companies, probably because he has developed such close
relationships with the dancers in the company.
In the studio, Bintley has always been physically active. In addition to describing how he wants a movement to go, he also demonstrates a step, arm movement or pose. On the other hand, he encourages the dancers to research their roles in order to thoroughly embody and personify the characters they are playing. A chief concern is that the dancers translate the story or theme of the ballet they are performing so that they can make an emotional connection with it and
communicate this to the audience. For The Dance House, he asked the dancers to find the depth of emotion required to express the grief that is felt at the loss of a friend as portrayed through the contorted movements he designed for this ballet.
In line with De Valois and Ashton, for Bintley the rehearsal process is just as much a place for nurturing dramatic expression as it is for learning and perfecting the dance material.
Bintley maintains the high technical and artistic standards inherited from his training at the Royal Ballet School, skills which he is always at pains to pass on to his dancers. He is concerned to preserve the traditions of danse d’école and of the English style and encourages them to work for maximum flexibility of the torso so that this area of the body becomes fully expressive in relation to the subject matter of a ballet. A supple torso or épaulement can enable dancers to take full advantage of the dynamic range and stylistic nuances inherent in the ballet vocabulary. Purity of line is also of major concern to Bintley and like his predecessors, De Valois and Ashton, he urges his dancers not to distort the balance of design in an arabesque for the sake of extreme virtuosity. Critics like Luke Jennings have complained that stylistic nuances such as épaulement used to be the hallmark of the English style for Royal Ballet’s performances of the
classics. Such fine-tuned movements have in recent years disappeared in favour of the virtuosity of multiple turns, over-long balances and extremely high and distorted leg lines (2006a).
When making work for large groups of dancers, for example, the corps de ballet section in Act I of Far From the Madding Crowd (1996), Bintley explains that he begins with the structure of the dance (interview 2004a). He chooses movements that will make an effective impression en masse, such as a moving shape or pattern. He claims that the group scenes should not be complicated. The scene of the ‘hiring fair’ in Act I of Far From the Madding Crowd is an example of this strategy. Bintley uses folk-influenced floor patterns or figures such as the whole round (see p.135). In this Cotswold Morris figure, the dancers travel clockwise in a circle holding hands. It is a simple floor pattern, but effective when performed by the corps de ballet purely because of the number of dancers who perform the figure. Bintley states that in this particular scene he wanted the corps de ballet to represent a peasant society and so he asked the dancers to move in a naturalistic
“earthy, loose” manner (interview 2004a) and to abandon the elegance of épaulement. Bintley says that he worked with a palette of steps which were particular to the story he wanted to tell. He employed what he calls “intuitive distillation” which is a sifting and filtering process which results in finding the steps or actions appropriate for the “particular little world” he wants to create (Bintley, interview 2004a).
Although his dancers are the main source of creative motivation for Bintley, he also finds inspiration from everyday life. When planning to create a new work he
says that he has a “psychic-antenna” attuned to pick up useful ideas circulating in the media (interview 2004a). For instance in his reinterpretation of the Orpheus legend, The Orpheus Suite (2004), Eurydice falls into a drug-induced coma.
Rather than having Eurydice imprisoned in Hades he places her in the
underworld of drug addiction and in so doing makes reference to the dark side of British society. A newspaper photograph of a teenage girl found dead in her bedroom from a drugs overdose had shocked him deeply and it was this image that he had in mind when trying to convey the plight of the enslaved Eurydice.
With the Dance House (1995) Bintley again responded to the problems of real life in modern society by bringing AIDS to the forefront of his artistic vision (see p.87). In the ballet, a male dancer, with blue-tinged skin, enters the dance studio and claims a number of the dancers’ lives. The scene of carnage left by the death figure represents the speed and ferocity of the AIDS virus.
It is not only the more significant social issues that interest Bintley. His creative vision is stimulated by small things around him such as a gesture, a picture or an action, for example he was inspired by the action of a woman taking a tube of lipstick out of her handbag and applying the make-up to her lips. He created a repetitive movement based on this action for the characters of the women in the Southern Cape Zebra section of Still Life at the Penguin Café. At the same time as he is attuned to such detailed actions or small events as ongoing stimuli, Bintley allows ideas for ballets to gestate over a period as long as ten or twenty years. He considers such a protracted period to be necessary particularly if he is to stage a full-length ballet. The timing for such a venture has to be right if he is to avoid either creative or financial errors. As an Artistic Director of a national
ballet company, it stands to reason that he has to be cautious and responsible about committing the company to expensive productions. He learnt his lesson in 1991 when his full-length ballet, Cyrano was labelled one of “the costliest flops in the Royal Ballet’s history” (Craine, 2007). Bintley waited sixteen years to re-stage the work for the BRB in 2007, at which point it received widespread critical acclaim and has become a key addition to the company’s repertory, an indication of Bintley’s artistic and personal tenacity.