Creator of playful Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal New Zealand Ballet

Liam Scarlett choreographer b April 8, 1986 d April 17, 2021

Dancer and choreographer Liam Scarlett, formerly a resident choreographer with the Royal Ballet in England, acclaimed and in demand by companies worldwide, is dead at the age of 35.

The Royal New Zealand Ballet’s production in 2015 of Scarlett’s choreography A Midsummer Night’s Dream was commissioned by earlier artistic director Ethan Stiefel, in a joint production with Queensland Ballet. (That was a welcome initiative of co-operation between the New Zealand and Australian companies, but one which, sadly, has not continued.)

Memorable features of the ballet include stunning set and costume design by Tracy Grant

Lord, and an inspired arrangement of the Mendelssohn score by the company’s then music director, Nigel Gaynor. It is a poignant and treasured work of theatre art.

The ballet opens with a little boy, the changeling child of Titania and Oberon, dressed in his onesie, settling in for a bedtime story. He falls asleep. What follows is his dream. He is disturbed by his parents fighting and separating, then by attendant Shakespearean mischief. He wakes up some hours later, thrilled that his parents’ disagreements are over, they are back together and about to be married, to the Mendelssohn Wedding March. He is the page boy, the audience are guests at the wedding, and everyone can expect to live happily ever after, at least for the meantime.

The ballet is due for a return production by RNZB this year, and Scarlett would have overseen the staging of that. The company, to its credit, is continuing with the season as planned, a decision which sits in stark contrast to several international companies that have recently cancelled contracts, commissions or seasons of Scarlett’s works.

This followed allegations brought against him by the UK’s Royal Ballet School, though not investigated with any transparency, trustworthy resolution, or public accountability. He was stood down from both the Royal Ballet and the associated school.

Other companies followed suit, but the final blow struck when the Royal Danish Ballet cancelled his production of Frankenstein within the past fortnight. Scarlett died the following day.

The RNZB’s press release, measured and sincere, is worth checking on its website. There will be challenges in its staging of Dream since 10 of the principal dancers who brought such sparkle and e´ lan to the 2015 production are no longer members of the company. Nonetheless, the ballet will happen here later this year.

Liam Scarlett was born in Ipswich, eastern England, and was already a budding choreographer at kindergarten, where he would organise his friends into their places on the end-of-term recital stage. He danced through his childhood years, then joined the Royal Ballet School. His promise as a dancer was soon eclipsed by his teeming choreographic imagination, as commissions came the way of an uncommonly young dance-maker.

Asphodel Meadows was his first notable success, in 2010. The descriptor reads that its title ‘‘refers to the place in Greek mythology where ordinary souls spend life after death and John Macfarlane’s set, which flows with the movement of the dancers, creates a sense of tranquillity and space’’.

Other works included No Man’s Land, in 2015, a memorial to lives lost in World War I. Frankenstein was a full-length sizzler. One wonders which companies will now take his many works into their repertoires, or have they gone with Liam into the Asphodel Meadows? It is too early and raw yet for answers to those questions.

Alexei Ratmansky, leading Russian dancer-choreographer, former director of the Bolshoi Ballet, now working in United States, holds worldwide acclaim for his productions with American Ballet Theatre and elsewhere.

He was refreshingly honest and heartfelt with his comments following Scarlett’s death.

That is worth checking online, as indeed are two major articles by Danish ballet writer/critic Anne Middelboe Christensen in Information. She tackles the wider context of power and control within ballet companies’ management and governance politics, tracing an example from Danish ballet history in the intrigue around the dismissal of Harald Lander, director of the Royal Danish Ballet in the early 1950s.

Poul Gnatt, who later founded our national ballet company in 1953, was initially implicated in that scandal, though was swiftly exonerated. The official document of apology and compensation paid to him for wrongful arrest can be found in his archival papers held at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Nonetheless the ensuing brouhaha and bureaucracy surrounding the case infuriated but also bored Gnatt, so he set off from Denmark for Australia, then New Zealand.

Who were the long-term winners there? Ballet in this country has a heritage of many wonderful people, and their stories deserve to be heard so they can be remembered.