Sir David Bintley: Ballet’s Freelance Knight

By Sylvia Whitman

In 2019, as his countdown-to-retirement clock was ticking at the Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB), Sir David Bintley looked to the future with a bit of trepidation. For 24 years he had been catalyzing world-class ballet in the middle of England as BRB’s director. “You don’t know what it’s going to feel like when you’re suddenly not,” he says. 

Less than a year into his new freelancing career, Bintley reports, “I feel … GREAT.” He laughs. “I cannot tell you the weight which has lifted. I never meant to be the guy who had to raise money and look after people’s lives. I loved it while I did it”—Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 2020 for services to dance—“but it’s great not to have to do it now. … I keep saying to people I’m going back to my old job, which is being a choreographer.”

Bintley is bringing his talents back to The Sarasota Ballet for the April Beyond Words program, which features three one-act pieces, all local premieres. Bintley choreographed one—”The Spider’s Feast”—and is co-staging another—”Dante Sonata”, Sir Frederick Ashton’s ballet based on The Inferno.

Beyond Words open with a romantic piece before taking a dramatic turn with “Dante Sonata”, which depicts the battle between Light and Darkness. Choreographed by Ashton to music by Franz Liszt, “Dante Sonata”debuted in London in 1940, months after the German invasion of Poland. It resonated with wartime audiences. By the 1950s, however, it seemed to have lost relevance, Bintley says, “and people were puzzled by this somewhat emotional piece.” It disappeared for half a century, lost until Bintley “exhumed” it. 

“I literally got together several marvelous octogenarian ladies who had been in the original, and they put the thing together, and I did some stitching,” says Bintley. “I filled in a few moments. I honestly couldn’t tell you what they were now because the piece is so seamless.”

The Birmingham Royal Ballet first presented the resurrected ballet in 2001—on the night of 9/11. Some patrons wept. “Dante Sonata” has become pertinent again. For ballet aficionados, the piece with its modern dance moves stands out as a remarkable anomaly in the Ashton canon, better known for romantic, sometimes humorous compositions. “It’s a real protest,” says Bintley. “It’s a work which is quite expressionistic, quite Germanic, in a way.” 

With costumes and set modeled on Sophie Fedorovich’s original 1940 designs (inspired by William Blake), The Sarasota Ballet is reproducing the work as it was conceived, Bintley says. “Now when you look at it, when you hear it, it is as authentic as is possible. It’s very important that we saved it.”

The evening will conclude with Bintley’s own“The Spider’s Feast”, best described as “fun.” Inspired by a “ballet-pantomime” set to Albert Roussel’s music in 1913, Bintley amped up the playfulness in the story of a spider assembling his dinner. “In my version, every time he thinks he got lucky, he hasn’t. He gets cheated out of his dinner, except maybe at the end.” 

Bintley choreographed “The Spider’s Feast” as a dancing test for Royal Ballet School junior and senior students, who have performed it a few times since 1997, but he’s thrilled that mature dancers will inhabit the roles for the first time in April. “For years I wanted to put it onto a professional company, because I thought there are things that young people don’t have the mastery of. One of them is comedy, which is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you’re 18.” Bintley knows this challenge firsthand as a dancer. “Comedy is a skill. You get a feel for an audience; you get a rapport.”

With a new design by Dick Bird, “‘The Spider’s Feast’ feels like it’s going to be a new piece,” says Bintley. “It’s a gift really. It’s the insect world. So, we play with the idea of scale.” The set doesn’t have many elements, but they’re huge, as the human world must look from a bug’s-eye view. “The piece takes place at dusk, and into the night, when all the creepy things come out. So, the costumes are quite colorful because they’ll play against the darkness of the set,” Bintley explains. The anthropomorphized characters are engaged in a war, with soldier ants (some played by ballet students) and wasp fighter pilots. “That’s the fun of it, spotting the human traits in the insect characters,” Bintley says.

On the subject of fun, Bintley is looking forward to sojourning in Sarasota for more than a month to polish his Beyond Words segments. “Now that I’m not tied in one place, I’m beginning to have metaphorical families all around the world. It’s a lovely thing.” It’s hard to leave a company after a run, of course, but the next gig awaits. 

“Luckily I’m in a position where I still have lots of energy,” says Bintley. “I still have lots of ideas. I’m looking forward, God willing, to a few years of doing what I set out to do at my beginning.”

There will be three performances of Beyond Words on April 24 – 25, at the Sarasota Opera House, with accompaniment by the Sarasota Orchestra. For more information, visit sarasotaballet.org or call 941.359.0099..