The Judas Tree (ballet)

The Judas Tree is a one-act ballet created by Kenneth MacMillan in 1992 for the Royal Ballet. The music is by Brian Elias.

The first performance was on 19 March 1992, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

The only clue MacMillan gave in order to understand his intentions is a programme note quoting Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Crime and Punishment": ‘[A]s a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, so the wrongdoer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all’.

According to the information at MacMillan's official website, this ballet is about "betrayal and guilt, individual and communal". The plot references the biblical betrayal story of the Kiss of Judas which leads directly to the arrest of Jesus and his later crucifixion. In this same source it is said that Macmillan was also thinking of contemporary "instances of betrayal, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989." Since the protesting students demanding democratic reforms were taken down by the Chinese army, "in spite of politicians’ assurances that there would be no violence".

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Wikipedia