The Royal Opera House will soon announce its new ballet and opera seasons — and add a little extra news. The ballet directorship of Monica Mason, due to end in 2010, will be extended until after the 2012 Olympics, when she will be almost 70.
This will deeply please those who see Mason as a safe pair of hands, the in-house ballerina who smoothed away the disaster of her predecessor from Australia, the late Ross Stretton, in 2002 and restored “English” order.
However, there will also be distressed head-clutching among the growing numbers who think that the Royal Ballet is becoming an increasingly lifeless organism in British theatre, and that any prolongation of this approach will qualify ballet for museum funding, rather than live arts.
Old-world warp
Under Mason, classics are given in runs of 20 rather than 10, programmes have reduced from a baseline 14 before the Royal Opera House development to 11 this season, the number of ballets shown annually is down from the high twenties to nineteen and new works, which were five or six annually, this season number only two.
What is the thinking behind this extension? Does the board believe that the Royal Ballet should be a balletic English Heritage or does Mason have a new direction up her sleeve?
Is Covent Garden staving off the awful moment when it is forced to wade into the crocodile swamps once more and choose from the clamour of vigorous younger voices out there? Or is there a hidden motive?
Could those extra two years be intended to buy time for a dancer to conclude his performing career and be ready to move upwards in 2012?
Among the many names often discussed as the next Royal Ballet director, the company’s Danish star Johan Kobborg is emerging as the favourite, more dynamic than the in-house hopefuls, less controversial than other eminent outsiders.
Arriving at Covent Garden nine years ago, he was the latest comet in Denmark’s astonishing run of male talent. An experienced child actor and singer, he took up dance late in his teens but within a year was in the Royal Danish Ballet, proving his artistic intelligence and physical gifts.
But Kobborg will be 36 in June, and injuries occur more often now.
His recent acclaimed stagings at the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi of the earliest surviving ballet, La Sylphide, won respect from dancers as well as watchers.
Increasingly, he uses his dancing talent not just to reawaken familiar classics but to get new ballets made. He was one of the four “Kings of the Dance” on a recent commercial world tour with stars from Moscow and New York which had no fewer than five new ballets created for them.
“This is more creativity in one show than the Royal Ballet has been managing in an entire year for more than a decade. An infusion of creativity, said Kobborg when I met him in Moscow recently, is what the company needs urgently.
“Of all the companies in the world, leaving aside the special case of Paris, the Royal Ballet can do anything they want. Many people want to run it. It is the most secure place on earth. It doesn’t have to do The Nutcracker or Jack and the Magic Beanstalk to survive. All the possibilities are there.”
And would he like to be Mason’s successor? “If I were asked to run it,” he says carefully, “I would say yes, definitely.”
Kobborg recently turned down the invitation to pitch for the directorship of his native company, the Royal Danish Ballet, too small a horizon for him. But coming from a tradition founded more than 250 years ago in a country of tiny population, he has a different take on what the Royal Ballet’s tradition is, and it isn’t “heritage”.
“Being a company only 75 years old, there isn’t much of a path set for it to follow. People who started it are still alive. The problem is that the Royal Ballet stopped looking for its tradition, as such, because that tradition was in being creative, in constant new choreography, in finding new voices.”
Urgent requirements
“You can certainly pin their dancing style down by the ballets that Ashton and MacMillan created. But now those ballets are being given out all over the place, which is dangerous.
"You don’t give away a company’s identity before it’s established.
“I think it no longer becomes a question of seeing MacMillan’s Manon, but of: ‘Should I see Svetlana Zakharova’s Manon or Alina Cojocaru’s Manon?’’’
Kobborg disagrees with those who claim that there is a shortage of British native talent. He thinks the Royal Ballet doesn’t move fast enough to capture it.
If Kobborg is right, the Royal Ballet’s problems are urgent — and Mason’s successor should be lined up sooner, rather than later. Good dancers will not want to spend their short careers being bored, any more than culture-lovers will want to spend money on unexcited dancers.
