The Royal Ballet pairs Jerome Robbins and Kenneth MacMillan on the Main Stage at Covent Garden, 9 to 28 November 2026.
Jerome Robbins and Kenneth MacMillan were born eleven years apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic and made the two most durable answers to the same question: what does a ballet look like when it is about people who could exist. Robbins, born in New York in 1918, moved between the ballet studio and Broadway all his life, from Fancy Free to West Side Story to Fiddler on the Roof, and brought the vernacular into the classical vocabulary without condescending to either. MacMillan, born in Dunfermline to a working family, went the other way, dragging psychological damage into a form built for princesses: Manon, Mayerling, The Judas Tree.
Between them they account for most of what the twentieth century added to ballet that was not abstraction, and both of them made a good deal of it on this company. Robbins also ran New York City Ballet alongside Balanchine, a partnership no other choreographer survived intact.
The Royal Ballet pairs them on the Main Stage from Monday 9 to Saturday 28 November 2026. It runs alongside the company’s Manon, so November carries two MacMillan programmes at Covent Garden at once — a full-length and a short work, which is the fairest way to see what he could do, since the long ballets and the concentrated ones are almost different practices. Both men are dead and both companies keep the work alive by dancing it.