He had the gift of revealing each individual's talents and had won their respect and belief in his work. To be in one of his ballets, even at the humblest level, was seen as a special bestowal of regard and made you one of a select, elite chosen few.
Throughout his creative career, Kenneth MacMillan was concerned with making ballets which explored the human condition. Even his early works sought to expose mental and physical anguish, sexual needs, through movement which became more assured and innovative.
He was rebelling against the conventional idea that ballet was light entertainment…He was saying that ballet can be like theatre, like cinema, it can tell you about your life, about other people’s lives, it can express things that are inexpressible in words.
MacMillan took the gritty realism accepted in theatre and shoved it into the fairytale decorum of ballet.
Kenneth made each dancer an integral part of the creative process, encouraging and stimulating the imagination to the limits, searching the soul for verity, no false airs and graces, no sentimentality, no pasted-on emotions. He wanted raw, gutsy, unattractive humanity out of which true aspects of the human condition could emerge. This kind of psychological delving and digging was not common practice in the ballet world of those days. With Kenneth we all felt like privileged scientists, pioneers opening hitherto unexplored territory and at the very forefront of innovation.
Dance Open 2016:
«Romeo and Juliet», Perm Ballet
Kenneth MacMillan in his own words
I turned to choreography as a release from dancing and I was lucky enough that the first thing I did everyone liked.
What I wanted to put on stage had to have more reality than much of what I was seeing in the 1940s and 50s… Ballet looked like window-dressing. I wanted to make ballets in which an audience would become caught up with the fate of the characters I showed them.
It is very English — you mustn't show emotion, and I think my ballets embarrass people because I let emotion out.