Manon (ballet)
| L'histoire de Manon | |
|---|---|
| Choreographer | Sir Kenneth MacMillan |
| Music | Jules Massenet, original orchestration by Leighton Lucas – New orchestration in 2011 by Martin Yates |
| Premiere | 1974 Royal Opera House, London |
| Original ballet company | Royal Ballet |
| Genre | Classical ballet |
L'histoire de Manon, generally referred to as Manon, is a ballet choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan to music by Jules Massenet and based on the 1731 novel Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost. The ballet was first performed by The Royal Ballet in London in 1974 with Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell in the leading roles. It continues to be performed and recognised internationally.
Kenneth MacMillan had been thinking about choreographing a ballet about the story of Manon Lescaut for some time. Three years into his artistic directorship of The Royal Ballet, he wanted to create a large-scale operatic ballet that would provide exciting roles both for the company's principal dancers and the corps de ballet.
On the last night of the company's summer season in 1973, MacMillan left a copy of Prévost's novel in Antoinette Sibley's dressing room, with a note informing her that it would "come in handy for March 7, '74". As the copy of Manon Lescaut was in a double volume with the novella Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, Sibley asked Anthony Dowell to find out which story was to be turned into a ballet, while she performed onstage in The Sleeping Beauty.
MacMillan began choreographing Manon during the 1973/4 season. He left the title character open to differing dancer interpretations, but was himself sympathetic to her poverty, believing that it was her desire to escape this that underpinned her decisions.
MacMillan used the designs of Nicholas Georgiadis, which reflected the "precarious division between opulence and degradation" with "the stench of poverty ever-present". The ballet's narrative structure is based on that of MacMillan's earlier Romeo and Juliet, with hero and heroine meeting each other as young innocents and their love being revealed through a series of pas de deux.
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